Literacy and numeracy are embedded throughout the day in a variety of ways within our Neighbourhood. We use an inquiry approach at all times in both authentic and more targeted sessions.
During the Morning Routine the children are introduced to new sounds. We brainstorm words associated with the sounds and practice making the sounds. The sounds we are exploring at the moment are ‘m’, ‘a’, ‘f’, ‘s’, ‘p’ ‘t’ and ‘i’. We also use this time to read and share rich literature. This may be a picture story book, an information text or a piece of digital literature. During this morning home group time we also explore counting and numbers. We use many games and real life examples to deepen the children’s understanding of both numeracy and literature.
Authentic affordances are set up with careful thought and planning, based on the children’s needs and interests, during our daily Provocations sessions. This is a wonderful opportunity to use the children’s natural curiosity to investigate open-ended real life problems or to playfully investigate hands on experiences. We, as teachers are constantly roaming and engaging with the children during these sessions, documenting and looking for opportunities to mediate and further enhance the learning.
Workshops are planned, based on the careful analysis of the documentation collected during our Provocations time. We are looking for the skills that will benefit and support the children’s investigational needs. At the moment our workshops are focusing on handwriting foundations, letter sounds, counting and number recognition.
All three of these areas work hand in hand with the whole experience of becoming authentic readers, writers and mathematicians.