Teaching young children in the first three years of schooling

The first day of school

The first day of formal school is a highly emotional experience for children, and often for their parents. School is a place of high expectations, of meeting new friends, of playing in new environments, of using brand new pencils and other new equipment, and of becoming familiar with the routine of the day. There have often been weeks of preparation for school, resulting in a mounting sense of excitement and perhaps anxiety. On the first day of school, most young children arrive with expectations of learning — of becoming 'smart'. They have lofty career aspirations of becoming astronauts, doctors, firemen, palaeontologists, zookeepers, ballerinas or rock stars. They are brimming with a desire to learn. They look to the teacher to provide this.

When they begin formal schooling, many young children are ICT savvy. They know how to use a mobile phone and an iPad, how to scroll through screens to find their favourite game or app. They sometimes know how to count and share and measure. They have a sense of wonder and inquiry about the world around them. When young children come to school, they are poised to interact with technology to build and extend their mathematics and science knowledge.

The purpose of this chapter is to focus on some of the important aspects of teaching and learning that teachers need to consider in their daily work with young minds. This chapter overviews teaching strategies, questioning techniques, assessment strategies and curriculum integration, all of which are important regardless of the curriculum area in which a teacher works. These ideas are revisited and extended in more detail in each of the chapters on teaching science (Chapters 3 to 8) and teaching mathematics (Chapters 9 to 13).

Teaching strategies

There are many effective teaching strategies and learning environments that teachers can utilise when working with young learners. A central consideration that should be at the heart of teachers' decisions is how they can come to know, and capitalise and build upon, children's prior knowledge and their experiences beyond school. This constructivist approach not only allows children to make connections and construct their own knowledge; it also makes learning more authentic and relevant to the children.

According to Ausubel (1968), what a learner already knows has a significant impact on their future learning. The challenge for teachers is to elicit children's prior understandings. This can be done using many and varied strategies — for example, questioning, looking at children's drawings or making observations of children role-playing or using puppets to discuss their ideas (Campbell & Jobling 2012).

When planning to develop and build on children's understanding in any subject, the teacher should use as many varied and appropriate learning approaches and environments as possible. Play-based learning is a very important element of teaching and learning in the early years of school. It capitalises on children's natural skills and interests, as well as their instincts and questioning to learn. Play-based learning environments for mathematics are elaborated in Chapter 9, with detailed learning experiences to build and extend mathematical thinking given.

Using a play-based learning approach is not the only teaching strategy for the early years of school. The approaches adopted often depend on the nature of the learning and the concepts involved. For example, guided discovery or inquiry learning may be more appropriate than play-based activities for developing children's science understanding of certain topics. Further, school-based events provide rich contexts for learning. The teacher's role is to draw upon the context of the school to create rich learning experiences. For example, the school may be located by the sea, near a rainforest or in bushland; it may have a creek running beside it, or be located in the middle of a busy city centre. The school's surroundings provide immediate access to a plethora of resources and contexts for making learning more meaningful. Similarly, events such as sports day, the swimming carnival, the visiting circus and the dental van can become the focus for learning. Many schools have kitchen gardens that are part of a whole-school enterprise. The kitchen garden provides opportunities for learning both science and mathematics, which are only limited by a teacher's imagination and creativity. Specific teaching ideas and suggestions for developing young children's mathematics knowledge are presented in Chapter 9, with links to science in relation to hypothesising, experimenting, recording and analysing data, and drawing conclusions.

Not all valuable and important learning experiences are achievable through play-based discovery or inquiry activities. Sometimes, teacher-directed activities will be needed to scaffold the children's learning. While play-based, discovery, active or hands-on learning activities are integral to facilitating children's learning in the early grades, it is reasonable to expect that children will sometimes sit quietly and listen to you, the teacher and/or each other. It is important to remember that children's learning experiences need to be diverse, and for this reason it is not sufficient for a teacher to rely exclusively on direct instruction; however, we do our children no favours by not expecting that they will develop the skills of quiet observation and respectful listening.

Questioning

Much has been written about questioning, and we consider questioning to be one of the most important skills of an effective teacher. Questioning allows teachers to establish what children already know. It is an effective means of formatively assessing children's understanding on an ongoing basis. In addition, questioning can be used as an effective means of scaffolding children's learning, and it can prompt children's reasoning and extend their thinking. It takes time, effort and practice on the part of the teacher to develop good questioning skills and techniques. Questioning approaches can appear to be teacher-centred, however, the effective use of questioning, for example, hypothetical questioning or open-ended questions that prompt children to explore ideas or make tentative suggestions can create a child-centred learning situation (Department of Education and Training 2003).

Campbell and Jobling (2012) described the purposes...