Teaching Thinking Skills Across the Early Years

A Practical Approach for Children Aged 4 - 7

Belle Wallace

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138147348
• eBook ISBN: 9781136606748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This book helps teachers incorporate problem-solving and thinking skills into the National Curriculum at the Foundation Phase and Key Stage 1, in line with QCA and DfES recommendations. It presents a range of activities for children aged 4-7 years, all of which have been tried and tested in classrooms. The ideas are cross-referenced with the Learning Objectives of the National Curriculum, and are enhanced with samples of children's work.

It provides sections on the core subjects of literacy, numeracy and science, and ideas for project work across the curriculum.

This book is aimed at teachers at the Foundation Phase and Key Stage 1. Teacher trainers, student teachers, teaching assistants, parents and all those working in early years settings will find it equally useful.

1
Teaching Problem-solving and Thinking Skills in the Early Years: Working across the Curriculum

The earlier we start the better!

BELLE WALLACE

‘We thinked and we thinked and we had an idea and we tried it and it didn’t work!’

‘So what did you do then?’

‘We thinked and we thinked again and then Jane had an idea and we tried it and it worked!’

(Conversation about problem-solving with a group of 4 year olds reported by Lesley Leigh)

Comment

The teachers in nursery schools, the Foundation Phase and Key Stage 1 have always taken on the responsibility of developing the basic building blocks of learning for all young children. And society takes it for granted that early years teachers will lay the bedrock of Literacy and Numeracy - and these days - the rudiments of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Of course, parents play an important role, but far too often in our

rushed society, young learners arrive at school with fragmented language patterns, inadequate pre-school experience of constructive play and talk, and underdeveloped emotional and social intelligence. This makes the professional role of young children’s first teachers one of critical importance — our early years teachers spend huge amounts of time advising and guiding parents, filling the huge gaps in young children’s experience, developing their social skills, building youngsters’ self-confidence and self-efficacy.

All other teachers from Key Stage 2 onwards, and parents too, rely heavily on early years teachers doing a good job!

And indeed they do! Working with early years teachers and watching their flexibility, their ability to tackle several jobs at once, their simultaneous attention to a variety of individual needs, their orchestration of a group of young egotistical individuals into a cohesive social group, while fostering each child’s individuality, provides a superb repertoire of skills needed by all subsequent teachers!

The dirty hairy black dog ran quickly up the slippery hill to catch a fat shaggy ginger cat.

Susan Hayward (Rec c/t) Harrowby CE Infant School (Lines)

A skinny grey mouse ran quickly away from the fierce cat into his safe little mousehole.

Susan Hayward (Rec c/t) Harrowby CE Infant School (Lines)

Paula Westwood (Rec c/t) Harrowby CE Infant School (Lines)

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is not to suggest that early years teachers are not already doing a fine job, but rather to show ways of extending and consolidating their work using a coherent problem-solving and thinking skills framework. Often teachers are intuitively working within a thinking skills paradigm, but this thinking skills framework needs to be infused throughout the whole school, and it also needs to be made explicit to the children so that they become aware of what thinking skills they are using and mastering.

This chapter will present a well-researched framework for a systematic approach to the development of problem-solving and thinking skills across the curriculum; and will give examples of activities carried out in classrooms. The problem-solving framework is called TASC: Thinking Actively in a Social Context and is explained later in this chapter.

Group Discussion

Reflect on the following comments made by teachers during staff development sessions and decide whether you agree or disagree with what’s being said.

Reflect

Let’s think for a while about the range of skills we want children to develop.

• How important is it that the range of skills is carried across the whole curriculum?
• Has there been regular staff discussion to make sure that the children are receiving similar messages as they move from one activity to another or from one teacher to another?
• To what extent are the children aware of the thinking skills they are developing?
• Are parents aware of the skills that we, as teachers, are trying to get their children to develop?
• Have there been any training sessions held for parents?

Purpose

So the purpose of this chapter is to encourage us to reflect on what we are already doing: to carry out an audit of our professional practice, and then to refine and extend that practice. In addition, we need to consider how to involve parents as much as possible since when home and school work together, the benefit for the children is enormously more effective.

Theoretical background to the model of problem-solving and thinking skills used throughout this text

In the mid-1980s, Belle Wallace and Harvey B. Adams surveyed the main thinking skills packages that were in operation in various countries around the world. In many cases they visited the countries and worked with the leaders and researchers working in the field of problem-solving and thinking skills. Then adopting an eclectic approach, they combined the successful elements of all of the projects they evaluated, and conducted an intensive ten-year action research programme with groups of disadvantaged learners and their teachers. Strategies and teaching methods were trialled and refined through a cyclical process of action, evaluation, reflection, and modification that involved the students, their teachers, a group of educational psychologists and, of course, the researchers themselves. This process resulted in the development of a model for the teaching of problem-solving and thinking skills known as TASC: Thinking Actively in a Social Context (Wallace and Adams 1993) which sets out a framework for the development of a problem-solving and thinking skills curriculum.

The Major tenets of TASC (extended from Wallace 2000)

Reflect

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• For Teachers, Parents and Children
• 1 Teaching Problem-solving and Thinking Skills in the Early Years: Working across the Curriculum The earlier we start the better!
• 2 Introducing the use of the TASC Problem-solving Wheel in Reception and Key Stage 1 Literacy: Developing Children’s Writing Skills
• 3 Using the TASC Wheel to Develop Problem-solving and Thinking Skills in Mathematics in the Early Years
• 4 Using the TASC Wheel to Maximise Children’s Thinking and Problem-solving in Early Years Science
• Bibliography and Useful Resources
• Index