REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL ST LEONARDS NEWSLETTER Principal’s Message
20th May 2022
By Mrs Simone Cooke
Dear Parents, At Reddam we offer our children a range of open-ended activities that require handson-investigation and problem solving, as we want our children to understand that there are multiple solutions to problems. Our Stage 1 children have been busy exploring cause and effect, experimenting with shadow play, creating rainbows and enjoying volcanic explosions. Our older Stage 4 children have been busy asking and answering questions, hypothesising , designing and investigating . If you watch children at play you will see they are perpetual engineers of their environment. They are fascinated by building things - towers, bridges, houses. They are forever pulling things apart and putting them back together. What we learn from observing children’s engineering is that, there is no ‘right’ way to construct or solve a problem, no one way to build a tower or design a sloping ramp to race cars down. It is all about trial and error and solving problems. As teachers our role is to extend and engage our children’s thinking, this may be through questioning “How can you make your bridge stronger?” or “How can I make my paper plane fly further? “. It is also about complicating their play by introducing ideas to encourage a different way of thinking. For instance, in the Stage 4 classroom at present the children are designing their own airports and have been introduced to geometry sets and graphing paper which has altered how the children are approaching the design task and constructing their 3D models. Providing children with opportunities to construct, experiment and solve problems provides them with a concrete understanding of important concepts such as how speed, velocity, weight and distance work. As the children brainstorm ideas, look for solutions and identify problems they learn to test and modify what they do, all of which instills important processing skills and teaches them to be critical thinkers. REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL | ST LEONARDS NEWSLETTER
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