Colouring inside the lines

Guest Blog Author: Ms R, Assistant Headteacher at a Primary School in Manchester.

“All you do is teach the children to colour inside the lines isn’t it?”

This is one of the most frequent, tongue in cheek comments I hear from teaching colleagues. Everytime I hear it, I grit my teeth and smile tightly, whilst burning with the deep desire to grab said ‘funny’ person and shake them violently. Luckily I’m a pacifist.

What I want to scream out is that I’m facilitating the children’s learning in a calm, purposeful and challenging environment. I’m planning adult led sessions that are taught to meet the children’s next steps across 17 specific areas. And how do I do all this? I observe! All the independent learning opportunities that my team and I provide each day are planned and ensure a child’s progression and one of the most prominent ways I can assess this is by observing!

The planning, observation and assessment cycle is intrinsic to the life of a early years practitioner. It allows us to observe children in a high quality and clean environment where they are completely at ease, motivated, happy and eager to learn. Without this observation we wouldn’t know all the tiny details which are so important in ensuring a holistic approach to each child’s education.

Recently I was reminded of the power of observation when I observed a child who has English as a additional language. He is fluent in Chinese and attended a private school until his move to sunny Manchester.  Understandably It took him longer that his peers to settle at the beginning of the term and he is still very wary and won’t freely communicate through actions or in words.  I observed said child during tidy up time. He was in the sand area where he had a number of plastic shells and two buckets. I almost waded in to hurry him up (always in a hurry!) and then thankfully realised he was doing something extraordinary. This child, who can’t yet communicate with me verbally, had realised that some shells have numbers and some have letters.  He knows the difference between numbers and letters! Not only that, he had used the pictures on the front of the bucket to work out which is the number bucket and which is the letter bucket. I then picked up a number shell and said ‘shell’, the brown eyed boy said ‘four!’ I picked up another and he said ‘eight!’  I continued this until he has recognised all numbers zero to ten. He knows all his numbers to ten!

In that instant the power of observation in independent, broad and challenging provision was hammered home. He won’t speak in a group but when he’s calm, in a comfortable environment and with a adult he knows one to one he will communicate, I can observe and assess him! Woohoo!

All the hours spent on creating differentiated learning opportunities in continuous provision are worth it. Those tears and struggles to find just the right size of shells for the bucket from the Internet are worth it because they are a effective learning resource. The brown eyed boy used them to tell me he knows his numbers 0-10!!!

In these days of formal baselines, summative maths assessments and levelled pieces of writing, this instance hammers home the importance of allowing children to learn in a variety of ways using a number of different approaches.

So the next time a colleague says “have you enjoyed your day of colouring?” I might just whip out my tablet and pull up the observation of the brown eyed boy and give them the ‘loser’ sign or I might just smile…

Ms R x