Friday 1 March 2013

Using Emergent Curriculum in a Kindergarten Program

Emergent Curriculum

Based on Stacey's (2009) work "Emergent Curriculum" has six main points or attributes to it. 
  • While framed by the educator, it is child initiated, allowing for collaborations and giving everyone a voice;
  • It is responsive to the child, allowing educators to build upon existing interests
  • In its practice, the educator takes on the role of the facilitator, taking what is seen and heard, and bringing the children the opportunity to discover further.
  • It is flexible in that curriculum planning, rather than being done well in advance, is constantly developing
  • It enables children's learning and teachers' thinking to be made visible through varied forms of documentation
  • It builds upon the theories of the recognised theorists in our field: the work of Dewey, Piaget and Vygotsky supports the practice of emergent curriculum.
In her work she looks not just at the theory but also provides many positive examples not only for Preschool age but also babies and toddlers. 

The practice elements of the EYLF advocate an emergent curriculum not in so many words but through "Responsiveness to children", "Learning through play", "Intentional teaching", and "Assessment for learning". It is also promoted by the QSA who construction the Kindergarten Guidelines for QLD which is based on the EYLF. 

To support educators the QSA has published some documents to introduce both the theoretical and practical aspects to emergent curriculum. They include:
  • Understanding emergent curriculum in practice
  • Planning with children: simple beginnings
  • Emergent curriculum planning: frequently asked questions
  • The spiders web: using children's interests to support curriculum planning 
and many other case studies. If you are reading this post and are interested in how best you can implement emergent curriculum I would suggest looking at their website. Whether you are an educator of babies or kindergarten children this is a good place to start and would encourage you to do so. 

In practice

In my kindergarten program I use emergent curriculum in different stages and in very different ways daily. One example is during rest time a child was discussing with an educator how important it was for her body to rest as well as her brain but did not know where her brain was and assumed it was everywhere. With the educators support based on her interest she researched the brain on the Internet found where it is, what it does and then compared a human's brain to a shark's brain. She learnt many new and amazing things in her mind but it was based on her interest. Then she decided she would create a poster about her discoveries and share them with both her parents and her friends. 

In other ways, we have changed and continue to change the learning environment based on emergent curriculum in order to encourage more sustained play at our Kindergarten both inside and out. 

I have started to experiment with food and time in relation to the child's needs and wants. This has been challenging for myself as being a classroom teacher in a school for at least 10 years letting control for routines and transitions be given up to the education process was difficult but I am so glad I have because it has been worthwhile. The children are starting to learn that when they are hungry they eat and if they want their play experience or investigation to last longer they can. What this has allowed is the children to really investigate and use higher order thinking skills in their play. Over the next few weeks I would like to continue to develop this type of curriculum particularly in the second kindergarten session.

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