What I learnt
The 7-hour workshop looked at the Early Years Learning Framework, discussed how children learn and looked at the enquiry cycle. It was interesting for me to realise that there is a great deal about educational theory that I have little knowledge of. Although library programs look to educate children there is a greater focus on enjoyment and as libraries don’t have a specific curriculum we can be more relaxed about whether the children are picking up educational principles or just enjoying themselves. However, having looked more closely at how children learn and ways to encourage them to think about what they are learning, I am hoping to incorporate more questions into my programs such as: “Why did you do that?”, “Why do you think this happened?”, “How did you know to do that?”. Hopefully, this will encourage children to not only enjoy the program but to think about what they learned from it as well.
The workshop also looked at child-led learning, many of the early childhood educators said that they saw the benefits of this but felt they were restricted by the need to meet curriculum requirements. Luckily libraries do not have curriculum restrictions and as such, we may be in the perfect position to run child-led learning programs. Currently, our programs are quite structured so this workshop encouraged me to research a less structured approach such as a makerspace. Leah Mann (2018) suggests that “Makerspaces are a prime opportunity for libraries to address the personal needs of not only students, but all library users in all library environments”, Mann shows how makerspaces contribute to information literacy skills and states that “When libraries include makerspaces, they… have facilitated an opportunity for them (users) to physically explore a topic of interest” (Mann, 2018). Makerspaces encourage students and all library users to facilitate their own learning, to explore what interests them and to discover things in their own personal way.
Since attending this workshop I have also run a number of “Little Science Explorer” activities aimed at preschool age children. We run three, hour long sessions, over three weeks for children and their parents and always one of the sessions is focused around the Human Body. Children engage in a number of experiments to explore how the body works including taste and smell tests, tracing their bodies and drawing and labelling the parts they know and using a snap lock bag, water and biscuits to show how teeth and stomach juices help us digest our food.
References
Little Scientists. (2019, May). STEM workshops – Professional Development for early years educators. Retrieved May 25, 2019, from Little Scientists: https://littlescientists.org.au/workshops/
Mann, L. (2018). Making a Place for Makerspaces in Information Literacy. (S. LeMire, Ed.) Reference & User Services Quarterly, 58(2), 82-86. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&AN=134186679&site=ehost-live
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