PLAYING, TEACHING and LEARNING

I'm beginning to realise that my new journey within the realm of home education is not just about the children learning. I will also be learning along the way. As a trained and experienced class teacher there are some teaching practices I won't need when teaching one child at home and others that I need to work on more.

Still, I am grateful to have learnt some things whilst studying and working as a class teacher. One of which is the importance of play, or more importantly and less understood, how children learn through play and how we as parents and educators can expand their learning through play.

Often when I mention I'm a teacher of little children or am homeschooling my five year old the response I get is: "at that age they just play".

It's the distance between the parent and the child that I hear in this response that concerns me. Play, especially when used with the term "education" doesn't just mean that children go off and do what they like without any adult input. Of course that is there too, but there is also much, much more.

When educating though play we can still have learning outcomes (what we would like our children to achieve), we can even still plan and definitely still interact with our children. The planning involves thinking about how to extend our children's learning, what our children are interested in and what environment we can provide that can cater to these.

As parents we can create a play environment from scratch for our children to enter or we can facilitate the play already started by children. That is; we can watch our children play and when we see an opportunity to step in and facilitate their play and extend their learning we do.

The children in these pictures decided to dress up as warriors and cowherd girls and boys. They began their play without adult intervention, with some sticks and a few flowers. The parents then provided more flowers and fabric. The parents demonstrated an interest in their play, participating in the children's role-play and dialogue.

The parents (knowingly or unknowingly) by engaging in their children's play and talking to them extend their learning in the area of speaking and listening.  They helped to increases their children's vocabulary (by introducing new words) and improve spoken grammar (by providing good examples of correct spoken grammar). Early speaking and listening skills are heavily linked to future English development, including writing, reading and comprehension, but that's for another post.

So, this is just one example of some children playing and how their parents facilitated their play and extended their learning in English. But such play based learning goes beyond the area of English it can cover all areas. In this example alone I have just mentioned English to save myself some time; physical, and creative learning was also taking place.

Play, therefore, if thoughtfully facilitated is a fun and great way for our children to learn.

I'm ending this post with a link to the blog "Juicy Learning" and a nice example of how a mother facilitated her sons idea and play to extend his learning in Science.