Cai's Home Learning

Overview

This badge was made to recognise the steps Cai is taking in pretend play, imagining and acting in roles and situations, engaging other children in pretend play and performing for an audience.

Tools that have been really useful in engaging Cai in pretend play and acting are the board game Whatever Next?, which encourages him to take on roles, play "shops" at playgrounds, board games set around pretend situations such as Bus Stop and Pop to the Shops, and a roleplay restaurant set. However, Cai often initiates pretend play in a range of situations, which helps him explore his learning and understanding in other areas--for example, pretending to be fish searching for rubbish in the ocean and bringing it to be disposed of before it can cause too much pollution and harm other sea life.

He also enjoys acting out narratives with toys, either unprompted or with tools such as Tell a Tale story dice and puppets.

He has engaged in group pretend play as well, including teaching a younger boy and a toddler the scenarios and collaborating with those children and a female friend in complex pretend scenarios.

Finally, he has learned, performed and improvised songs, replacing words and concepts and showing an understanding of rhyme and rhythm patterns.

At this age, I'm more interested in promoting improvisation and exploring different points of view than any attempt at learning set scripts.

Learning Goals

• Increasing empathy
• Promoting creative and imaginative skills
• Improving communication skills and presenting to audiences
• Creating logical narrative
• Social skills: collaboration with other children

Australian Curriculum Links

Arts (Drama)

Explore role and dramatic action in dramatic play, improvisation and process drama:

• taking part in purposeful dramatic play focusing on experiencing the roles and situations they create
• taking turns in offering and accepting ideas, and staying in role in short improvisations
• exploring possibilities for role and situation when participating in  teacher-led process drama and roleplay
• Use voice, facial expression, movement and space to imagine and establish role and situation
• Present drama that communicates ideas to an audience 

English

• Innovate on familiar texts through play
• Listen to, recite and perform poems, chants, rhymes and songs, imitating and inventing sound patterns including alliteration and rhyme
• Recreate texts imaginatively using performance

Personal and Social Capability: Social Management

I have not been keeping my recording resolutions, either here or on my private journalling. Must Do Better. After all, this is it, the year when the other kids are at school.

Here is an attempt to touch some highlights, anyway... Lots and lots of boardgaming, all of value. The gameschooling thing is serving us well as a method of learning that never, ever needs coaxing. Covering maths, observation, deductive play, reading, and lots and lots of pretend play.

The pretend play is particularly prompted by a board game I picked up for $3 at an op shop, Whatever Next? Cai is fairly obsessed with it. There are lots of prompts for pretending on the cards you draw, and Cai gets so into his narratives and acting out that a single turn can take what seems like hours and hours... :) He gets incredibly much out of it, and also sneak learning happens, such as explaining why sheep need to be shorn, and what the qualities of wool are...

 Cai asked to learn about the solar system, and as my own knowledge is pretty sketchy, we've been learning together. We've been using child friendly videos mostly, but also books and games. He soaks it all in avidly and asks bright questions. As for me, I feel like I'm learning all kinds of cool stuff along with him. :)

Another interest we've been reading about together a lot about the human body, and how it works. I'm fascinated by what grabs his little mind.

Playing with his friends has been very much of value. As an only child, he doesn't get much chance to act out disputes with other kids, and I've been really pleased to see that he can clash wills with them but still love them hard.

Still working on fine motor skills a lot--tracing lines, threading beads, absolutely anything I can think of that he will enjoy doing. I really want to get his muscular and motor control down. The weather has been hot, but he's got in a lot of climbing and swinging and things regardless, especially with friends to prompt him. And he is always in motion.

Cai's let his Youtube channel slip a bit, but I don't want to force it, despite the time I put in. He'll come back to it, or not.  I have to remember not to impose my own hopes on him.

 His maths aptitude always astound me a bit. He will make mathematical conclusions spontaneously--"Six? That's easy. Three and three!" he says, as he picks up three toys in each hand. We also accidentally ran into long subtraction through playing Prodigy Maths, and he really seemed to grasp and enjoy doing it in concrete ways with his Penguins on Blocks, taking away groups of penguins and rearranging them to make blocks of tens and "extras". I love teaching through manipulables and games

And speaking of manipulables, his fifth birthday meant I pulled up his Balance Beans, designed to teach algebra. So far, he likes just free play with them, which I think is of lots of value itself at this stage. But his other mummy enjoyed the "very hard" challenges...

I feel like I'm not reporting much despite getting a lot done, and I have to change that, because it slips my mind so fast. I need to get in the habit of recording everything he does, for the purposes of later reporting.

Tomorrow--the museum! The trip and meetup were planned last week, but hideous weather intervened.