🙏 I would like to thank Ubuntu Education for inviting me to share my experience as an aspiring Foundation Phase Teacher at their Play-Based Learning Conference.
🤗 It was an honour to share the screen with so many inspiring practitioners in the field.
🎤 The conference theme was "Play-based learning for Impact and Innovation," and I used the opportunity to speak about using literature-based lesson planning to work towards continuity and progression in the foundation phase classroom.
⚖️ Many years ago, I was attracted to how Tshepo Madlingozi (he/him) used African literature in his teaching of South African law, providing students with much needed context and examples of applicability in a field that is still entrenched in western ways of being and knowing.
📖 I'm a keen reader who holds a degree in the Theory of Literature and African Languages, and one of the ways in which I wanted to show up authentically to the classroom during my teaching practicals was by sharing the power of storytelling with learners. I decided to use children's literature as an anchor for my lesson planning, which allowed me to use a single book to cover multiple topics over a number of subject areas.
🐰Harnessing the skill of effective lesson planning and aligning content with curriculum standards (which is highly stressed in my Postgraduate Certificate programme at Instill Education); I spoke about how I used Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol to regulate learners, connect the story to their own contexts, and deepen their understanding of the learning objectives.
🎭 This approach gave me the structure that I needed as a novice teacher coming into a classroom that did not have a term plan, and helped me present high quality lessons over an extended period. I incorporated play-based strategies like readers theater and design thinking, providing learners with multiple opportunities to go over the text and critique it from a language, numeracy and life skills perspective.
📝 I found that allowing learners the autonomy to apply their minds, bodies, and voices to the ideas that came up intensified their engagement with the material. This continuous learning using the same piece of literature made it easier for me to collect data on how learners received the instruction, and it contributed positively to their learning progression.
📱I ended by highlighting how I believe that by planning for the classroom, telling our own stories, and continuing to learn and innovate, we as teachers can positively impact the early childhood education space. And as coincidence would have it, Ubuntu Education is hosting a webinar on the Hub this week on how to create engaging educational resources for the classrooom, and have invited me to contribute.
💻 I'm excited about sharing how to leverage Canva (my newest favourite toy) for this purpose, which is what I used to create a book on classroom management this week.
👉 Register here: https://bit.ly/4fPRE8x
