 The learning environment, physical and social, plays a critical role in children's learning. To now read our chart, we're going to see if it makes good sense, okay? So up at the top, do you know what this says? Children feel secure and ready to learn in programs that are well-organized, with predictable routines, as well as mutual respect and positive relationships with teachers and peers. And that is how they feel. All of these qualities are important for children's emotional, social and intellectual growth. Because I asked you, she asked me, you asked her, yeah, okay. We should pull out. I wonder, this is looking very much like what we have in our tank. Did you tell mom about our caterpillars? No. We will turn into butterflies. Take a look at them. Maybe in a minute, come over to the tank. When the children come in the door right at 8.30, it's really important to us to make sure that every child feels special and that they are welcome, that this is their home away from home, that we are truly happy to see them. Learning is an emotional process, as well as an intellectual one. When children receive emotional support and encouragement, they feel more secure and they're more persistent and independent learners. One of our biggest tasks as kindergarten teachers is to help them build relationships that are positive and successful with each other and with the teacher. Many of those relationships with the other children are built through the teacher. If children enter kindergarten and the first lesson they learn is they can't succeed, we run the risk of that lesson staying with them for a lifetime. So success through relationships is one of the most important opportunities we can provide children in kindergarten. We've really tried in the classroom to create a sense of harmony and to create a sense of acceptance of all children. So we've really worked hard at responding to the needs of the child. We try and keep very calm, very respectful, and that there is this tone, this caring and nurturing environment that we have tried to foster. When children come into the school for the first time in their lives, and for many this is the first time, they need to learn how to behave in a group, they need to learn how to share, how to care for each other, how to demonstrate concern and affection for each other, and it is through the structures that the teacher puts in place in the classroom that children learn this. The classroom is very organized. Everything has a place, everything has sort of a function. It's very important that children know that we respect the materials in the classroom and we want them to respect them as well. So if they know that when we are playing with materials we need to kind of put them back, that we can go back to sorting them or we can arrange them in a way that's pleasing to the eye. I think it also gives children a sense of security, knowing that the books are always kept in a certain basket or the black mats are in a certain pile. I need you, I need your data and I need to get finished tomorrow. Childhood is a magical and a mystical time. There's nothing like watching the joy on a child's face when he or she takes that first step and realizes they can walk or the first time they can make a toy squeak on command. And they come to us with that same eagerness to show what they can do. Kindergarten children are natural explorers and they look for answers using everything available to them. A rich environment encourages children to challenge themselves and the theories they have about the world around them. Over time as teachers build their program they collect resources that fill the classroom with learning opportunities that stimulate all the senses. Dynamic kindergarten classrooms provide children with materials and props and resources that they wouldn't typically have at home. So different kinds of clay to experience. Water and sand and messy materials that they might not have are all typical but when we visit the Reggio Emilia environment in Italy which is a world model we see very creative use of other resources such as mirrors such as lights which might be a slide projector on the top of a step ladder shining down so children can make different shapes in the light. We see light tables where children can sort shapes and colors. So we really encourage our kindergarten teachers to look for resources that might have been considered adult in the past. We need to think of the child as capable when we're setting up our learning centers and offer them opportunities they may have never had before. By creating some softer light and some things that twinkle or that create a sense of almost fairy tale magical quality to them things that feel really precious to children. They respond in a different way. They treat the materials with a little bit more respect. There is something intrinsically motivating for children. Children come to us with different personalities and different ways of being. It's important when we design different spaces for different types of children or for their needs at different times of day. Some children like to find a quiet place where they can be alone. Some children need a boisterous place where they can play noisy games with each other. It looks like it's a pretty big rainbow cement. It's a lot of icing now. We also need a space for large group instruction and small group instruction where a teacher can work separately with children. This one is none of it. None of it. None of it. And the peg is right here. Organizing the kindergarten learning environment takes careful thought and planning. It needs to engage all children with a wide variety of abilities, learning styles and preferences and to enhance every aspect of children's development. When we're talking about aesthetic and artistic, we're really talking about the fine arts. We want our children to be comfortable with dancing, singing, playing, dramatizing. These are all ways that are critical to a child's learning. If all we had to deal with in the school system was academic development of children, it would be very straightforward. But we know that children do not develop academically unless they're well-grounded socially, emotionally, and they're healthy. And so all of these pieces have to work together. The children during book time just really has become quite magical. There's a number of little girls that love to read together, so they found certain books if I have two copies of them, they will sit and they just are so motivated to try and teach someone else to read. Yes, you can touch it. This is the size of a hand. Physical development has always been an important part of school curriculum, but it's becoming increasingly important. With the societal changes we've seen around media and screen activities with children, and so we're making sure that we're building into all of our school programs healthy activity, small muscle for some of those tasks that require finger skills and hand skills, but also the big muscle activity, which is a very important part of brain development. Cooperation, collaboration and teamwork are part of what's required for all of us as adults as we move through our lives and our careers, and it's the same for children in schools. So we start in kindergarten right away building communities of children where they learn what their place is, what their role is, how to negotiate their way through social circumstances. I don't because I play in real life. In real life, so you're not playing in it. Children have it within themselves to be actively engaged and responsible for some of their learning or much of their learning, and I think the teacher's role is then to help facilitate some of the learning. This is learning through play. This isn't the children being mindless about what they're doing. There is great intention and purposefulness in what they're doing in the classroom. Part of the planning of the classroom environment is how the teacher sets up the individual learning centers to be places where children will intentionally be learning some of the activities involved in the prescribed learning outcomes. So probably each day a teacher will put something new into several of the centers and part of the way that she motivates the children to discover and explore those and to introduce them at carpet time. Sorry, did you have a question, Matea? Yeah. What was that? Well, we put the stuff and then we add what and then we color it. Color the picture of the sentence. Are you talking about the water table? Yeah. Remember, you choose an object. I know we know that. I just want to do a trick now if it doesn't want you to do an X. Katie knows what she's doing so you can ask Katie. So she stimulates and sparks the children's imagination with what she introduces at the carpet time to give them that thirst for getting there and beginning their discovery. Tell me what you made. Well, I think play is really important for the children because it's something that comes naturally to them and when they play, a lot of the times they're interacting with another child and so the more that they interact and they talk with each other I think the more that they'll learn. They're like little adults, they want to talk to each other, they want to question things, they're curious about things, they want to ask each other about what it is that they're playing with and they want to work together or try something and experiment with each other. Young children's natural capacity and desire to learn and the teacher's response to children go a long way in shaping the quality of children's early learning experiences but the importance of the child's environment should not go underestimated. It's the third teacher. That's why such care is taken to plan learning experiences and learning centers. Children have in them so many ideas that they are just bursting to get out Our responsibility as teachers is to help them unlock and discover those things that they're thinking about inside and that becomes really the true curriculum. Play, it's the cornerstone of a young child's development. The positive emotions children experience when they play are as important as the skills they are building. Through play, children come to enjoy learning and to embrace it with confidence. Brain research tells us that children who are brought up in a play-based environment have stronger social skills, have greater development of creative thinking and intellectual skills, have less aggression, have less anger, are more prepared to take risks, are more prepared to be imaginative in how they proceed not just with their childhood but with their lives. We know from Clyde Hertzman's work at UBC that on average 25% of the children that come into our schools are not ready to read. This is in large part because children come to school with widely varying experiences with books, with the ability to write, to paint, and kindergarten is a time where we want to, as I call it, level that experience field. Language and literacy development in young children provides them with a strong basis for successful learning throughout their lifetimes. And oral language is the foundation on which literacy is built. Through play, teachers can foster children's awareness of the sounds and structures of language. So during the time when the children start to settle, certainly some children are still signing in and coming in a little bit later. Other children are putting their backpacks away and getting themselves organized in the coat room. We may start to sing songs as small groups start to form around books that are known to them, and I start to read with children. So that time can look quite chaotic and there's lots going on. I call it noisy reading just because the children are noisy when they're reading. With them, it's all about the oral language experience. So with our kindergarten children, they need that opportunity to vocalize and to talk through the pictures and to share the information with each other about that. Once we've settled in and we've read our stories, then what I often do is I use that time as a little bit of an explicit investigation into our literacy and into the kindergarten literacy program. So that's an opportunity for me to have the whole group be able to spend some time focusing on some of the things that are in our kindergarten curriculum related to our oral language and our literacy development. Magic box, we have a T and an E at the very end. There's a missing letter in the middle. From September until now, which we're nearing the end of our year in kindergarten, that also looks very different. We have much less words. We have much easier words in that. There's not as many sentences and there might not be any of our letters missing. And so, again, that's a real gradual process for children to work through that process of the secret message. And again, through observing your children and through knowing their capabilities and where they're at, you can modify that to meet their individual needs. I think kindergarten kids have this enthusiasm for learning that is unparalleled by any other age group. They come in and, you know, things come out of their mouths like, I love school, oh, I missed you on the weekend. And, you know, those comments are just, they're heartwarming. You know what, I see Nikki's brain is working and she's thinking, she's thinking very carefully, even about what she'd like to do. My role is the role of facilitator and guide her and I'm just basically trying to encourage the kids. I want to make sure that they feel successful. I want to make sure that they feel confident. I want to make sure that they feel independent. I think those are all qualities that they need to have in order to carry them forward through school. A stranger who is typically not familiar with schools might walk into a kindergarten classroom and believe that this is a relatively unstructured environment. In fact, the very best kindergartens have a high degree of structure behind them, even though they may appear not to be structured. This is the most critical role that the teacher plays. Is that true? We're going to talk about that. You guys are going to help me. Come up here, you're going to help me. The carefully planned kindergarten teacher at the beginning of the day is very intentional about how the day is going to unfold. When you write a letter, you need an envelope to put your letter in. He or she will have carpet times planned where large concepts will be introduced to children, where they will practice skills, where learning centers will be introduced that are being added to the room. You need to know the address of the person you're sending it to. The timer is up. If you would like to choose a different center, you do need to clean up. Center time for children is the busiest time of day for the teacher. She has multiple roles that she must accomplish during center time. She may take her clipboard and move from center to center and observe several different children and how they're working on that particular day if she's had skills that she's asked them to focus on or work she's been doing with them. So if you want to write to Aryan, you can start by saying two Aryans. She may be stopping at different centers and asking questions and probing to encourage children to take a new step, a different step in their learning project. I did six. She might stay at one center and begin the development of a project with a group of children who are particularly interested in something special. She has multiple roles. In the hands of a skilled teacher, play is a rich laboratory that can be used to teach multiple concepts. Children need two kinds of opportunities for play, those initiated by the child and those guided by the teacher. I have my curriculum in what I need to do according to the ministry guidelines, but I want to also be respectful of their interests and what they would like to do. So it's a bit of a give-and-take relationship, so listening to them so that they feel like the kindergarten classroom is their classroom. A prime example of using what the children are interested in and designing a center around it is the kindergarten grocery store center because we've always had the cash register. We've always had the food and we've always had that little shopping list guide. And they were starting to make strides and starting to do a little bit of writing at that center, but by adding some more props and, you know, like the flyers and the grocery list paper and the little shopping baskets and then encouraging them to go around and price all the food. As you can see, that was a very popular center and they were very, very involved in it and enjoyed and there's a lot of good learning that happens there. As there are multiple ways that children learn, there are multiple ways that children play and a really healthy learning center environment should offer all kinds of different experiences for children so they can experiment, they can construct, they can play games together. We had just visited a farm and it was apparent throughout many of the scenes that the children were really engaged in farm animals and what happens on a farm and they have just brought this new field trip experience into their classroom. Part of me introducing the masks was for them to have that freedom to explore what animals do and be able to take that into the dramatic play center and extend their learning with the farmer-animal relationship into the dramatic play. Oftentimes units can be teacher-directed but with children's input for sure involved in them and I think that there are other themes we might have where it directly comes from the children. They start to see lots of worms outside and all of a sudden there's this interest in worms and mud and so then we might take it into, you know, some planning on insects and worms and mud and all of those things that they are keenly interested in learning about. And Erica was building her little farm in the Play-Doh corner and she was building a fence and she was keeping her fence quite horizontal. So we talked about, well, what could we do to keep the animals in and how could they feel safe? How could we build it up so that they weren't able to jump over it and so eventually she did switch and put the sticks into a vertical position so she was able to have it higher than the animals that were fenced in. In the Block Play, the two children were really actively engaged with each other and I think they were using a lot of their prior knowledge about our farm field trip to how to use those vehicles and what types of things they might have put in the vehicles and where those might be carried from farm to grocery store back to grocery store to farm. So they were having a really in-depth conversation that really was just leading itself. Research shows that teachers can have enormous influence on children's learning. Through a combination of educator-guided and child-directed activities, teachers help children extend what they're doing and to make meaning of their world. What I love best about Kindergarten is that the children come in with smiles on their faces and this freshness to the school system and it's through that slow, gentle guidance of the teacher that we can really help children unfold and meet their fullest potential in the school systems. And this is where it all starts. Inquiry-based learning sounds like a puzzle, but it's not. It's really a combination of a number of different skills that teachers use. It's relying on emotional intelligence of children where we are in fact scaffolding their learning experience a la Vygotsky's theories, where we take a child to the edge of their ability and just give them that extra little gentle nudge that through questioning like, what do you think would happen if and what if you had tried that? And can you think of a different way that you might be able to use that particular tool or resource? And so it's encouraging children in a very basic way to be researchers to puzzle through, to problem solve, to begin to think about what the next step in their learning could be to help them to be responsible for their own learning. I just wanted them to play with the materials just to feel them, just to mix them, just to see what would happen when the water hit this cornstarch because we haven't done that before in our classroom. So what if toys, some of our water toys, do you think we could play with water toys with this stuff? Yeah, but we need to get the little bit. I try to ask them the questions so that they can come up with the answers themselves and it makes their learning more real. It makes them take ownership over what they've done and what they've learned and discovered on their own in their careers. If I were to tell them, we're going to mix these two things together and this is what it's going to do and this is what it's going to be like and this is how it will feel and then they did it. It wouldn't be as exciting and meaningful for them as if they just did it themselves. As a principal of an elementary school, I'm very excited about the play-based and inquiry-based kindergarten and the role it plays in developing our wonderful little children. I taught kindergarten for many, many years and so as a principal, it is my love and passion to make sure that those children get exactly what they need to start their years. I feel that my role is to not only support the kindergarten teacher but to inform and let the rest of the staff know exactly why we have the kindergarten program as a play-based program and to ensure that the parents as well know why we are teaching kindergarten the way we are teaching kindergarten. There's a considerable bank of research now on the impact that a principal has on new programs in a school and one of the things we know is that when a principal supports a program, understands it and provides for it in the principal's planning, the program is going to be more successful, the teacher is going to feel affirmed and overall the learning experience will be better for children. There are other ways of encouraging inquiry in learning centers that are non-verbal in nature, for example. If the children have been accustomed to a block center, for example, that has multiple different kinds of blocks in it, after a week or so you may want to introduce a different material to the block center, putting tubes and marbles in a sand table which has previously simply been a place to play with sand will change the whole type of activity that the children engage in with sand, tubes and marbles. So by combining unusual resources by posing a question at a center that causes them to use the materials in a different way, we then have children working collaboratively to play games to see what they can learn in a very different way. Oftentimes the children will take props from other centers, other parts of the classroom and incorporate it across different centers which is really neat to see. That was them going into the dress-up box and finding the walkie-talkies and I'm sure that that's something that they've seen at other stores that they've gone into with their families so they're just re-enacting what they know. How do you open the cash at this store? How much did a binoculars cost? One of the biggest lessons that kindergarten children have to learn in kindergarten is learning how to get along with each other and so when they come to me in September, my focus in September is working on rules, routines and strategies around problem solving. So we talk about sharing, we talk about trading, we talk about taking turns, we talk about rolling a dice to see who gets to go first in a dice game. In September, it shows that intentional play experiences can support the development of self-regulation, one of the most important skills children will need for future academic success and for success in all aspects of their lives. Self-regulation has a great deal to do with building bonds and forming relationships with others and then working jointly with others in cooperative ways and so by what we set up at a social dramatic center for instance where we're encouraging children to model ideal adult roles that they may have observed in a shopping market or post office and being able to coach them on the appropriateness of their behaviors through that kind of activity is a very important part of what we're offering in our learning centers. Self-regulation is about many of the skills teachers use in their classroom practice sharing ideas and solving problems together managing powerful emotions planning ahead and planning with others taking safe physical risks struggling through the hard parts to learn something new using language to resolve conflicts. A teacher who is sensitive to children's emotions will ask questions that help children interpret their feelings, label them and regulate them in socially appropriate ways. Daniel, what did Diego do that you didn't like? I liked him when he put them in the book on my face. How does it make you feel? So what happened with Diego was there was an issue at the puppet center and I think the little boy he was playing with, Daniel put the puppet in his face and he did not like that and Diego came over and got me and said and he explained to me what happened and I'm happy to go back and coach the children through it because they are really and truly five and six year olds and they still need quite a bit of support. It was very clear in observing that incident which was very spontaneous in the classroom that teacher had worked with that group of children in a very positive and proactive way to teach them those steps so that when the incident occurred the opportunity was there for just a review not for dealing with the situation in a negative way but rather turning it into a positive constructive experience for the whole class. Nikta, what's the problem? The shark hits the bee. The shark hit the bee. Let's see if the bee knows how to use his power talk. Can I get a one, two, three. Action! A hundred of times. It makes me feel. And what power talk does is because it's a formula it gives the children set words to say and in doing so it empowers them because they know exactly what to say and it also helps with the language barrier because a lot of the children who come to me in September they have limited English skills and so by giving them a formula it also allows them to be able to problem solve with their peers. Next time, please don't what? They don't want it a million times in my head. Okay, I'm sorry. I won't do that again. The act. Now Eric, is it okay now for Sharky even though he said sorry and he said you'll never do it again do you think it's okay for Sharky to do it again? No. Is that what a kind friend does? No. No. You know it's not just about saying stop I don't like what you're doing. The other piece of it is that that person has to listen and they have a responsibility as a kind and caring friend and respectful friend to listen to the requests of their peers. Effective kindergarten programs provide opportunities for children to interact with adults and other children in ways that build on children's natural curiosity and sense of wonder. And successful programs emphasize learning through play and inquiry. One of the remarkable things about our modern-day world is the tools we have at our fingertips now with the internet and the live searches that we can do with the moment's notice. I think when we start children in kindergarten posing questions to them, encouraging them to explore, encouraging them to discover encouraging them to ask questions we are in a very positive way getting them ready for the world that is in fact going to be at their fingertips in very short order. Let's see. So my intentions with the butterfly theme is to fulfill obviously the prescribed learning objectives that are set out by the ministry. With the pocket chart, for example, I'm trying to get the children to learn new sight words, which is a language arts PLO that they are required to learn. And I'm trying to teach them some of the letters, some phonemic awareness, listening to the first sound or the ending sound, some phonics. What sound does that letter make? And then at the same time, I'm trying to get the children to stand up and move around to come up and put things in the pocket chart so it really engages those kinesthetic learners. So when we talk about extending and deepening the experience we're really talking about using the same prescribed learning outcome but giving the opportunity to children to move from just a taste of the experience into deep thinking about the experience and into even deeper thinking by moving the play to a long-term project that could last in the classroom for as long as a month. I want you to think about what stage are our caterpillars in. Part of the purpose of that pocket chart was to also show them what they can do when they go to the centers on their own. There are butterfly-related activities, such as the writing center, there's butterfly paper. In the art center there are little butterfly shapes. We even have a science center where we have our caterpillars, which I showed during the language arts or the science lesson, and so they can go to that center and explore with a partner some of the questions that they have about caterpillars and butterflies. Through this open-ended exploration, children work at their own pace and level as they identify, label, categorize, and reflect on their new discoveries and make sense of the world. The teacher continues to make plans to guide the child's learning, but she makes adjustments as she observes what the child finds interesting. This is the emergent curriculum, where teacher's planning matches the spontaneity that arises out of a child's daily life. I could imagine that the group of children there who were intensely interested in those pupae moving to the next step, I could see them becoming even more intrigued by the flight of the butterfly. There was talk of them going to see real-life butterflies and starting to look at flight. Well, if a group of children, and particularly when it gets to be half the class, particularly interested, a teacher can easily move that into the next stage of what could we be exploring next that could be linked with butterflies? Is it wings? Is it flying? And then flying can become an intense interest in trying to fly kites, which leads us to a discussion of how we make kites and how we might make some in the classroom and projects on whose kite can fly furthest when we take the beach trip and parents go along with us. And that might lead to talking about airplanes flying and bringing in an aviator to talk with the children about his experiences. And it can go on indefinitely until the children start to lose interest and then it's time to move to something different. When cocoons are sleeping, and then they turn to a butterfly. A child's language development is one of the strongest predictors of early reading success. And we know that if children don't read by grade three, it's an uphill struggle to help them reach high school reading levels that are absolutely essential for them to graduate. So paying attention to oral language as soon as we meet these children, and ideally even younger than kindergarten in the Strong Start program, for example, is absolutely critically important. This is the color of your zip card. This is turquoise. Oh, you've got a circle within a circle on this. Oh, and it's flat. Children learn language by using it. They learn language by hearing other children. They learn it by learning it from adults. So the more teachers are moving through the classroom, extending the children's vocabulary by proposing new words to them, by encouraging the class as a whole to practice the use of new words, all brings that excitement alive about language and is a very big investment in their reading success. This one shimmers. Can you see? You look in the light and you hear this one shimmers. Do you think this one does? And this one? And this one? What I would like us to do if we could just stop for a minute, we want to be really careful because we've got lots of buttons and mats on the floor. If we could maybe come and just move up to the front, then we'll have a chance to look and see what other people have done. A skilled teacher plans activities that encourage children to practice using language and to learn from each other. Children thrive on new words and can hardly wait to go home and tell mom and dad the big one they just learned today. There's a happy face on one of the button mats, okay? Does anyone else notice something different or interesting about their buttons? What did it look like? An emotion. Research affirms that observation with young children is the best way to do assessments. Through observing children, we discover what they know and where they need to go next. Observations help teachers plan next steps and extend and deepen children's learning. Individual teachers will use their own style, but it's important that they pay attention to not just the immediate activity a child's involved in, but the series of activities that a child's involved in. Children develop new skills and abilities one step at a time, and while teachers often see evidence of outcomes, the actual moments during which a child learns can be invisible to those outside the classroom. Many teachers have found their own ways to capture evidence of children's learning as it occurs. Documentation of the learning process might include portfolios, checklists, videos, scrapbooks, drawings, and posters. And I thought they were stairs. We've learned a lot about the creation of learning stories where a teacher or in fact children can be taught to document their own learning experiences through photographs, through representations of their work and turn them into scrapbooks and portfolios that can be reviewed with families, can be a record of the child's progress through a particular skill or a particular project. This is a learning story about how we all play in the same language and it's focused on five children in our class and they started out by, they invented a little game with singing and dancing and chanting movement. They continued, they made rules about the game, they decided how it was going to work, who was going to do what. They continued to change over the rules and they didn't rely on me for anything. In my intervention, this was completely independent. I was just snapping photos. Another little girl who does not speak the same language of these children at all. In fact, they all speak, these ones speak different dialects and she speaks English. She asked, can she join in? They accepted her into the group and she joined in the songs and the dancing and they continued to play for about five minutes after that. So there was no language per se behind the play other than play itself. When I look at the picture, it reminds me exactly of what was going on at the time. What is that? It's really good for my reflection and it's really easy. It's a really user-friendly, easy way to assess children. These are very important ways that reinforce for a child that they are indeed learning and they can review their progress and celebrate their progress along the way. It's a very powerful way to make meaning out of the children's learning over the long term.