Exploring Time and Place Through Play

Foundation Stage - Key Stage 1

Hilary Cooper

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135397890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book is packed with fun and exciting activities that enable the child to make sense of the world that they live in and relate it to their own experiences in order to enhance their personal and social development.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction

TIME AND PLACE are accepted dimensions of the early years curriculum. Children talk about past events in their own lives and those of their families, listen and respond to stories about the distant past and learn to differentiate between past and present, using time vocabulary (QCA 2000: 94–5). They observe, find out about and evaluate their own environment, identify features of the place in which they live, and they find out about different environments through story, using appropriate vocabulary, (pp. 96–7). The importance of learning through play runs throughout the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA 2000).

What practitioners wanted to know

This book emerges from an in-service course for early years practitioners, called ‘Making Sense of My World’, funded by Cumbria Early Years and Childcare Partnership. During the course, participants completed a questionnaire asking whether they thought that children could find out about time and place in play contexts. They thought that this was possible, but said that they would appreciate ideas about how to initiate and support such play.

The course had focused on the implications of Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years, the ‘REPEY’ project (Siraj-Blatchford et al. 2002). Taking this into account we decided to set up a small project to see how we might help children to explore time and place through play. ‘We’ refers to three local education authority advisory teachers, nine tutors from St Martin's College and many practitioners working in early years settings, several of whom had been on the course.

Research underpinning our enquiry

Sustained shared thinking

The REPEY project was developed to identify the most effective strategies and techniques for promoting learning in the Foundation Stage. This study found that adult–child interactions which involved ‘sustained, shared thinking’ and open-ended questioning were essential in extending children's thinking. The adult is aware of and responds to the child's understanding or capability in the context of the subject or activity in question, the child is aware of what is to be learnt, (what is in the adult's mind), and both contribute to and are involved in the learning process. For the learning to be worthwhile the content should be in some way instructive. In effective settings almost half of all child-initiated episodes which involved intellectual challenge included interventions from a member of staff. However, the REPEY study also found that, while the most effective early years settings encourage such dialogue, it does not occur frequently.

Play within instructive learning environments

The REPEY project found that the most effective early years settings provided teacher-initiated group work, balanced with an ‘open environment’, where children had ‘free’ access to a range of instructive play activities in which adults supported their learning. In good and excellent settings equal numbers of activities were initiated by adults and by children, suggesting that effective settings encourage children to initiate activities and dialogue previously modelled by staff. Freely chosen play activities often provided the best opportunities for adults to extend children's thinking. Children's cognitive outcomes appeared to be directly related to the quantity and quality of teacher/adult planning in which activities and dialogue were differentiated to provide appropriate levels of challenge and children were formatively assessed and given feedback in order to plan for future learning. The best outcomes were achieved where parents and practitioners had shared educational aims and cognitive and social development were seen as complementary.

Practitioners’ curriculum knowledge

In the REPEY project, practitioners’ good curriculum knowledge, in addition to an understanding of child development, was found to be as vital in the early years as in later stages of education. It is necessary to know the questions to ask and the ways of answering, the key skills and concepts which are central, at any level, in different areas of learning.

Planning our project

First we agreed on the curriculum knowledge, the key concepts and skills which, at any level, lie at the heart of enquiries about time (pp. 8–10) and place (pp. 14–16). Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA 2000) defines content (finding out about families and the distant past, about the place where children live and distant places), but is less clear about HOW to find out, the questions to ask and ways of answering them.

Then we agreed on a manageable scale and organisation for the project. Each of the advisory teachers and St Martin's tutors would work collaboratively with practitioners in a nursery or reception class. This would make it possible to work together, engage in discussion and joint exploration and draw on a rich variety of expertise and perspectives. It would also involve classes in schools of different types and sizes (a nursery school, nursery units, reception classes in infant and primary schools). The schools are in very different social, economic and cultural environments: tiny rural schools, schools in towns, in inner cities, including St Martin's partnership schools in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. We hoped that this would provide some insights into the importance of the impact of social and cultural contexts on the ways in which learning objectives must be differently planned for.

In each class the visiting tutor or advisory teacher would work with the permanent staff to plan activities on a theme linked to either time or place, within their existing medium-term plans. The activities would include different kinds of play. They would include time for one or more of the adults to observe and engage in dialogue with groups of children. Their talk would be captured on video or audio tape or in field notes, so that it could be analysed later by all the adults.

Our questions

Our aim was to apply the key findings of the REPEY report to activities that would develop children's concepts of time and place. Through collecting empirical evidence from these different settings we wanted to gain some insights into:

   the curriculum knowledge – the questions to ask and ways of answering them, which adults need in order to interact with children to extend their thinking;

   planning skills – how to use the curriculum knowledge to plan for teacher-directed learning linked to free access to activities investigating time or place;

   dialogue – ways in which to engage in discussion with children about time and place.

The case studies

Chapter 2 explains why we think that finding out about time and place in play contexts is appropriate and important for young children, and identifies the key concepts and skills involved. Chapters 3 to 6 focus on time; Chapters 7 to 12 are about place.

In Chapter 3 Deborah Seward and Vicki Boertien explore ways of developing children's very limited social and communication skills and their self-esteem through play activities which encourage them to talk about themselves, ‘then’ and ‘now’. In Chapter 4 Wendy Robson shows how skilful questioning enabled children to draw on what they already knew about castles and apply it to their imaginative play. Stories about the past raised questions for Alan Farmer and Anne Heeley, which they discuss in Chapter 5. Do imaginary times and places help children to explore concepts of time and place? Can young children differentiate between imagination and things that really happened? Does it matter? Should adults encourage them to move from fantasy to reality? Alan and Anne draw some conclusions, based on their discussions with children. In Chapter 6 Hugh Moore draws on his experience of teaching Key Stage 1 children, describing a rich variety of play activities which helped them to investigate life in the distant past.

Jane Yates in Chapter 7 reflects on questions which arose when a group of four- to eight-year-olds took her with them in their place capsule. In Chapter 8 children are observed playing freely in their own ‘secret places’ outdoors and explain why these are important to them. Jane Dixon and Sue Day show how opportunities for such play can be created and how it contributes to all the areas of early learning in the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA 2000). Respect for children's need for privacy, and also the rich knowledge many young children have of distant places is the focus of Chapter 9. Cynthia Ashcroft and Sophie Mackay show how story tents, inspired by the tents of Saudi Arabia, North American Indians, the Innuit and North African nomads were made and used in classrooms to develop imaginative play about journeys and other places, as part of the Tower Hamlets’ Oracy and Global Learning Project. By contrast, in Chapter 10 40 nursery children go camping for a day in their local mountains in rural Cumbria and learn a lot about features of the landscape, recording routes so that they do not get lost on their adventures; they even catch a bear. In Chapter 11 children remember routes and landscape features as they help Bo Peep to find her lost sheep. Chapter 12 is about weather. A group of nursery children rebuild Percy the Park Keeper's shed after a storm and spontaneous conversations with adults about observations of ice and snow lead reception children to set up a role-play weather station.

We certainly did not embark on this project expecting to discover models of ‘how to do it’. We expected that, like all good enquiries, it would raise more questions than it answered. We hope that you, the reader, will engage with our questions and reflections, in the light of your own experiences, as the case studies evolve. At the end of the book in Chapter 13 we draw together the strands which run through the book.

CHAPTER

2

Why time? Why place?
Why play?

Hilary Cooper

Why time?

EVERYONE LOVES A STORY… stories ‘open out fresh fields, the illimitable beckoning of horizons to imagination … picturing the facts, lapping around them like seas around the rocks upon the coast … essentially poetic’ (Rowse 1946: 53–4).

All stories are about events and changes which happen over time, in our own lives and in the lives of others, whether recently or long ago in folk memory. Engaging with stories helps us to understand ways in which we are similar to and different from others, to consider why people behaved as they did, why there may be different versions of stories. Stories contribute to a growing sense of identity, an understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in the world.

Young children love to hear, to retell and talk about their own and their family stories: what they did as babies, what happened when Granny came to stay, when they got lost. Often events are linked to photographs or other records – baby books, birth tags, toys, birthday cards. In telling their stories children use the language of time: old, past, now, after, next. They talk about ‘yesterday’, ‘last summer’, ‘when I'm five’ (DFEE/QCA 1999: 104; QCA 2000: 94–5; 2003: 43, 46). They learn to put events in order, to clarify their thinking and ask questions (Why? How? Where? When?), in order to try to explain why things happened: we moved to this house after my brother was born, then I came to play school; I couldn't come to play school before because it was too far, but now I have lots of new friends (QCA 2000: 58, 62, 74; 2003: 21, 45) (see Chapter 3).

Young children pick up on our constant references to the passing of time. ‘Piglet told h...