Nursery One
Term 1
Inquiry topic: What Shapes Can You See?
Nursery One are beginning to speak more and be more involved in what they are doing. Teacher Firzanah listened and observed that the children in the class enjoy playing with shaped objects, and that is where she decided to tap on a basic concept - shapes.
Week 4 What Can We Do With Shapes?
January 25, 2019
In Week 4, Teacher Firzanah translated common interests into activities that were related to shapes. One of those interests were ice-cream.
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Teacher Firzanah combined fine motor skills, numeracy, shapes and ice-cream into a learning corner activity, where children are to scoop out "ice-cream" pom poms into their bowl. The children can also challenge themselves by following the card "orders" and scoop the correct number and colour of "ice-cream" into their bowl.
Week 3 How Can We Draw Shapes?
January 18, 2019
In Week 3, Nursery One are well aware of basic shapes and shapes that they can see in their environment. They then proceed to a sub-topic of shapes: lines. With lines, they are able to draw anything that they want, including shapes
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Week 3 focuses on their fine-motor skills to be able to hold a tool to trace or draw, such as using gel bags, and drawing various lines with the help of songs.
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Week 2 Where Can We Find Shapes?
January 11, 2019
In Week 2, Cheryl pointed to a wall chart and said "square!". As the children were already able to identify some basic shapes, they began to explore shapes in their environment.
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In this particular Language & Literacy lesson, where they were learning about a few letters and their letter sounds, the children were able to identify a circle within the letter "a". Teacher Firzanah was using sandpaper letter cards and allowed the children to trace the letters with their fingers.
Week 1 What Are Shapes?
January 4, 2019
In Week 1, children will be identifying and working with shapes around them.
In this lesson, Teacher Firzanah used describing, telling and scaffolding for children to revisit and identify the shapes and also sort them onto the correct shape mats.
Lesson Objectives:
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Children will be able to identify each shape by articulating or pointing when prompted
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Children will be able to sort shape cut-outs by putting them onto the correct shaped mats
Teaching Techniques:
Teacher Firzanah used describing as one of the main teaching techniques for this lesson. She described the shapes according to their properties, such as “three straight sides” and “three pointy sides” to describe a triangle. As children in Nursery One are building up their vocabulary (Women’s and Children’s Health Network, n.d.), describing and telling is helpful in letting children associate the description of the shapes with a concrete object, heightening their awareness of the properties of the shapes (MacNaughton & Williams, 2009).
Another teaching technique that Teacher Firzanah used in this lesson is scaffolding. Scaffolding is the provision of guidance by a more abled peer or adult (Santrock, 2014). Teacher Firzanah allowed another child to give guidance to a peer who was having trouble and also provided guidance herself. According to Beaty (2012), by giving descriptions, modelling, and questioning, the children being scaffolded are able to increase their level of competency, and eventually meet the objectives of the lesson, which is to sort the shapes onto the correct shaped mats.
