During the early years at Cannon Hill State School, students are engaged in a beautiful learning environment, where Learning Play is important, and Explicit Teaching is also important.
Learning Play is Important
Learning Play is a classroom environment designed thoughtfully by teachers to provoke curiosity, literacy and numeracy concepts and higher order thinking, in a playful way.
The classroom has a number of learning centres, each set up with specific playful objects in them. The children make choices about where they play each day during the Learning Play session. They move from exploring to projects.
Children engage in Learning Play four mornings each week. This is designed to help them to learn and use appropriate, effective and complex oral language in a variety of contexts.
Research tells us that when children have a command of complex oral language they can:
- Read at a higher level of comprehension
- Write at a level that shows thinking
- Talk with peers in socially appropriate ways
- Use language to think and problem solve in a variety of contexts
- Self-regulate through self talk.
Explicit Teaching is Important
Every day children are explicitly taught Literacy and Numeracy skills from The Australian Curriculum.
The Australian Curriculum in Prep is designed to develop:
- successful learners;
- confident and creative individuals; and
- active and informed young people who are ready to take their place in society.
It sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life - wherever they live in Australia and whatever school they attend.
In their first year of school, students learn through teaching interactions with others, experimentation, practice and play in the classroom and school community.
Priority is given to literacy and numeracy development, as these are the foundations upon which further learning is built. Opportunities to develop literacy and numeracy are found in all subjects but particularly in English and Mathematics.
Philosophy is also explicitly taught. This is taught so that children learn to think deeply and clearly. They learn to find the problems with their thinking and the thinking of others. They also learn to conceptualise ideas.
Beautiful Learning Environment
We are influenced by the Reggio Emilia Project approach. This approach involves giving children the opportunity to show us what they can do in their learning. Part of the approach is the notion that children need to learn in beautiful environments that support learning and encourage curiosity.