Glen Education Serrell Street

Time is a Privilege

Lyndal McVie, Early Childhood Teacher

As educators this question, "What is worthy of children's time?"  needs to be at the forefront of our mind when we are planning for the children we teach. Seeing each child as an individual learner and basing our program from their interests and individual learning styles.

We do however need to be selective on what decisions we make deciding what interests we focus on in our program that it is meaningful and interesting, so the children are going to be able to extend their learning and knowledge about the area of interest. 

If an interest is strong, it will naturally evolve with the child/ren and educators as questions are asked, together children will instigate their own learning with the support and scaffolding from educators who are actively involved. When offered experiences they find interesting, children will take them on strongly and want to learn. Our job is to tune into these interests in a meaningful way. 

Recently two of our children spotted butterflies in the garden and began drawing butterflies, talking about the knowledge they already had learnt from home. Linking this knowledge to our program we explored how we could encourage butterflies to come to our kinder garden. The children said we needed flowers. 

As educators we could see how this interest could provide the whole group a opportunity to become involved learners. Together we watched a short documentary on creating a butterfly café and then came up with a list of what we needed with the children’s input to plant our own butterfly café. This interest took several different learning paths. Gardening, butterfly habitats, local café’s (humans) in our community. 

This keen interest by the children clearly demonstrated to us as educators that when we tap into the children, we are teaching interests their participation and eagerness to learn more about a topic can lead to more than what we even imagined creating a wonderful learning environment that is a journey for all children and educators.