Park Hill Adventure
for adventurers 2 1/2 - 5 years old
Where conceptual, theme-based, immersive learning happens
A Guide to
The Natural Learning Approach
Preschool Curriculum
A Conceptual Guide to Teaching
The Role of the Teacher
The teachers in the Natural Learning Approach have several responsibilities. Foremost, they have the responsibility to help the children understand and learn concepts. Not all children learn in the same way. Each may have a different propensity to be a kinetic learner, an auditory learner, a visual learner, a linguistic learner, etc, and the teacher must exercise keen observation to determine the best approach. In doing so, the teacher respects how each child learns, and guides the child through the process of using his or her own individual experiences in broader ways, to generate new hypotheses and construct new meaning. The teacher recognizes that children don’t learn best when just handed facts, but reach more optimal learning by exploring different ideas in different ways, coming to understanding through their own work. During exploration, the teacher creates opportunities to emphasize relationships and reinforce understanding.
Another important responsibility of the teachers is developing a school community. The teachers must understand the families’ backgrounds, so that they can provide the child with experiences that are meaningful. They can also use that knowledge to create opportunities for all the children to learn more about specific ideas, for example, different cultures or family structures. With the development of a feeling of community, families become partners in the educational process.
Teachers also have the responsibility to document. Careful documentation provides teachers with opportunities to reflect on what the children are learning, how they are progressing, whether they need additional time to understand any particular concept, and if there are additional avenues for exploring the concept. They can also determine whether there is interest to move in a different direction, and can start planning the next lessons. Additionally, documentation is used to keep families abreast of the current lessons, and the concepts that are being explored. By having documentation boards in the classroom, even the children can reflect on the activities that they are participating in.
Finally, the teachers have a responsibility to provide active communication. They must communicate knowledge to children, relay progress to parents, and discuss with colleagues about each child’s progress. The teachers must be able to foster collaboration through communication and devise individual strategies for each child.
Respect for each child
Every part of teaching the Natural Learning Approach is rooted in respect for each child. This covers aspects such as the individual learning style of the child, the child’s own interests and talents, the child’s own potential and the special gifts that the child can contribute to the classroom. This respect is shown in the way that the teacher listens to the children, and observes what they are doing. The teachers then tailor their interactions with each child, changing their approach based on the child’s learning style and communication level. During these interactions, the teachers observe and document what the children are saying and doing, so that the teachers have a good idea of whether each child is developing their understanding of the concept under discussion appropriately, or if a different approach needs to be taken.
Emphasize Relationships & Understanding
The teacher’s role in the Natural Learning Approach is not to fill the children solely with facts. It is, instead, to teach the children how to think and reason. The teachers fulfill this role by emphasizing relationships and fostering the understanding of concepts. Beyond just factual information, the teachers guide discussions about complex concepts such as how things are similar to one another, how they are different from one another, how these relationships appear with other objects, how the relationships can be used in the children’s lives, and even – with some topics – what emotions the children have about the relationships and concepts.
School Community
Community is one of the most important aspects in our society, and feeling a sense of belonging within a community is an important aspect of humanity. Developing feelings of kinship, respect and compassion creates community. The teachers using the Natural Learning Approach feel strongly about working with families to understand their backgrounds, and to prioritize educational directions that are important both educationally and holistically. Families want to be involved, and have a say in their child’s education: from diet, to activities, to the educational environment. The partnership between teachers and families provides the best experience for the children. In the best circumstances, the families also enjoy interacting together outside of the school setting, making the community inside the school even stronger.
Documentation
The teachers observe the children throughout the day, and note things like what the child is saying about a particular activity, and what the child himself says he is thinking about the activity or concept. It is the teacher’s responsibility to reflect on the documentation once it has been gathered, to observe, analyze and interpret what new information can be learned about the child’s ideas and interests that can be used for lesson planning.
Communication
As a teacher, communication is one of the most important skills to have. The teachers communicate with families about the progress of the child in a number of different ways. There is an online community board, where the teachers can post about what is going on at school at any given time. Families are notified about special events, and activities that are going on. There are also documentation boards, where pictures of children during lessons are posted, along with descriptions about what is happening, and quotations directly from the children, so that families can have an idea about each child’s progress.
The teachers communicate with the children to help them learn important conceptual skills. They guide the children through problem solving, and challenge each child to reach the next step. The children also work on their communication skills by developing more vocabulary and learning to translate more complex ideas.
Finally, the teachers communicate amongst themselves. Each teacher shares observations about the progress of the children toward comprehending the particular concepts. They also share their observations about the children’s individual learning styles, and develop strategies for teaching concepts in ways that are tailored to each child’s abilities.
Lesson Planning
Playing refreshes us. And when we are lost in our playful delight we see the world differently. . . ~Carl Nordgren
Lesson planning is a crucial component to any curriculum. The Natural Learning Curriculum’s focus in terms of lesson planning revolves around conceptual learning. The process of teaching a lesson plan starts with a theme of interest that becomes the conduit for teaching concepts. Each lesson plan could last a few days, a week or a couple weeks depending on the concept or concepts being taught. Certain tools such as creative props, art projects, and acting in free-flow plays are then used for the children to understand and use the concept throughout the lesson period. Once the children learn the concepts through the lessons, the teachers re-enforce those concepts while the children are at free-play. This curriculum is not based on children sitting down at desks and memorizing facts that could be forgotten or only partially understood; but an immersion approach that is guided by each child’s personal interests and personal learning style. The concepts are constantly reinforced in many creative school projects, free-play and their daily lives with school friends and family.
Examples of Lesson Planning – “Memories”
For one unit, the theme was “Memories”. Memories include the foundational concepts of emotion, time, sequence and direction. Teaching the lesson plan expands beyond the foundation concepts, and covers advanced concepts such as art and language. The unit is two weeks long.
At the beginning of the lesson period, the teachers have group discussions with the children about the nature of memories. These question-and-answer discussions are used to set a baseline of the children’s knowledge, and are used as jumping-off points to explore the foundational concepts more deeply.
For one activity, the teacher puts items in a “memory box” that the children have decorated. The items are selected intentionally – with one item that each child has a special affinity for. The children gather in a circle, with a special chair – the “memory chair” – included in the circle. The memory chair has been decorated by the teacher, and is used to stimulate curiosity, and also to make the child feel special when it was his or her turn to sit in it. The teacher chooses a child to sit in the memory chair, and takes an item out of the memory box. The teacher gives the item to the child in the memory chair, and asks the child questions about what memories they have of playing with the item themselves, and what memories they have of playing with the item with their friends. Once all children have a turn in the memory chair, that particular activity is concluded.
Another activity involves the children painting cards. The teachers have one-to-one talks with each child about memories that the child has about their grandparents or other special person. During the discussion, the teacher documents the conversation, and records the memories in the cards in the child’s own words.
Throughout the unit, during free-play, the concept of memories is reinforced when the children want to repeat something that they had done the previous week. The teacher takes that opportunity to point out that the child is describing a memory from last week, and then helps the child complete their task.
The environmental board is used during the Memory unit. It is decorated with stars and clouds. The children take home blank clouds and parents and children write on the clouds about some favorite memories that the parents have with their children. Then those cloud memories are put on the board for possible later discussions.
Behavioral Instruction
Behavioral instruction is a key component to a child’s development. Parents have a very complex and difficult job in raising a child. The curriculum reinforces positive behaviors and helps correct and explain negative behaviors that all children go through from time to time. Good manners, cooperation, communication skills with adults and peers, and a multitude of other behaviors that children must master are consistently monitored.
Documentation
One consistent tool that helps shape the children’s education is the documentation of their learning process. Documenting is the act of writing down what the children say, cataloging their art with a title and date, taking photos or video during activities and creating documentation boards on the wall, which communicate a child’s thinking process and comprehension of the concepts being taught in the lesson. Documentation is used not only as a learning tool but also in part as a diagnostic tool to see what children understand, gaining insight into their thoughts.
Documentation should be displayed in the classroom. Because there are pictures of the children engaged in activity, and written quotations about what children have said, the documentation in itself is part of the communication to families about what their child is learning. By displaying their drawings, paintings and sculptures, the children themselves develop a feeling that what they create is important.
The documentation is used as a map to demonstrate the different skill levels and learning styles of each child. It can be used as a guide to the way the teacher interacts with each child on an individual level.
Examples of Documentation – “Memories”
During the Memories unit, the children created cards for their families. The teachers recorded the child’s own words about memories of their grandparent or other special person. The child’s statement was used to discern whether the child understood the concept of “memories”. The cards were then signed and dated and displayed in the classroom before being mailed to the recipient.
Throughout the activities, such as decorating the memory box, sitting in the memory chair, and gathering memories for the cards, photographs were taken. The teachers also wrote down quotations from the children. The pictures and quotations were used on a documentation board for the parents and children to see.
Best Practices of
The Natural Learning Approach
Student-to-Teacher Ratio
The student-to-teacher ratio is crucial. There are optimally three or four students for each teacher, which allows the teacher to gather the appropriate developmental information for each child. The ratio is also important in the free-play segments of the day, when the teachers are able to monitor behaviors and at the same time reinforce the lesson plan.
Family Involvement
Families become part of the fabric of the school. Whether providing a dish for group snack/lunches, providing a home to have the children’s holiday party, or donating time in the classroom, family involvement is a key to the success of the program. There are many times when parents have had connections to learning experiences that all the children benefited from. For example, a grandmother who was a ballerina taught a lesson, a parent knew a linguist who shared how to speak Mandarin, and a grandfather who is a musician came to the school to sing and tell stories. Parents have been instrumental in helping these experiences come alive within the school context.
Day Writer
The “Day Writer” is a one-on-one lesson in which the child and the teacher discuss a letter that the child is unfamiliar with writing. They discuss how to write the letter, and the teacher assists with descriptive mnemonics to reinforce memory about how to form the letter. The teacher presents activities such as thinking of words that begin with that particular letter, and the child writes the word. The activity during the Daily Writer expands into rhyming, syllabication and alliteration exercises, and these concepts are reinforced throughout the day.
Responsibility Board
The responsibility board is a list of duties that each child is responsible for during the week. When responsible for a duty, the child is given a title and carries out the job all week long. The duties cover jobs such as alerting students when its time to pickup, helping teachers lay out the chairs for lunch, helping sanitize their peers’ hands, and many other jobs. For example, a popular responsibility is that of the Town Crier. It is the duty of this child to alert the group about pick-up time after the free-play time block is completed. The Town Crier first gives a five-minute warning by going around the room shouting “Five Minutes to Pick-Up!”. Then after the five minutes, the Town Crier circles once more, shouting “Time to Pick-Up!”. If there are children who have not yet begun to pick up at that point, the Town Crier is also responsible for politely reminding that child that it is pick-up time.
Nutrition
Strong nutritional health is important for a child’s development. Parents send their child’s lunches and snacks so that they can be in control of the nutrition and because they know what their child likes to eat.
Time Blocks
The day is structured in time blocks composed of free-play, instructional art, lessons, snack, reading, lunch, naptime, and home preparation. The day is not built on strictly regimented half hour blocks. Rather, the lesson plan determines how the above categories are laid out in time blocks for each day, and for the week. The schedule is very malleable, and if things are not completed during one time block, they can easily be continued in another block. This helps the children develop a concept of time, but not be rushed or constricted by time. Additionally, the children develop a sense of continuity for process that is not time-bound: even if the art block ends before their painting is finished, they can resume the creative process in the next art block.
Art Instruction
For children the world is a new frontier full of radically new concepts that can be grasped through image.
We as a society tend to silo our bodies of learning without exploiting the connections they all have with one another. Imagination has an important role in children’s search for knowledge and understanding. It is the intention of this curriculum to combine children’s natural imagination with both expressive (music, writing, dance) and representational (painting, drawing, sculpture) art as tools for learning. In order for this process to be effective, art must be taught in a way that allows children not only to share feelings and emotions, but also to learn concepts and be able to creatively play with those concepts. During the process of revisiting the same concepts through other media, children learn problem solving, divergent thinking skills such as flexibility of thought and originality, new perspectives and access to emotion. Children are also able to develop abstract personal relationships – for example the relationships between color and emotion, as well as gaining concrete foundational knowledge like the letters of the alphabet.
Art serves several purposes. It makes abstract concepts more concrete. A paragraph about how the planets revolve in the solar system is not as effective for understanding as actually creating a model of the solar system. Additionally, art provides an outlet for concepts that the child cannot yet describe in words, like sadness or beauty, and what those ideas mean to the individual. Art can also help develop new cross-neural pathways by exercises that insist on combining different categories of senses – for example drawing a picture of a smell. Beyond even those purposes, art can drive curiosity about the physical world: it can involve playing with light and shadow, natural media like grass and twigs, even projects involving insects. Art can even foster broad universal concepts such as the axis – the earth rotates on an axis, bicycle wheels have an axis and spokes, when you peel an orange, you can see an axis – and if you cut the orange you can see spokes.
The Role of the Art Teacher
In addition to the role of the teacher described above, the art teacher focuses on facilitating conceptual learning through art of all types. Art projects and instruction are an essential part of the general lesson plans, and provide several different ways to explore the concepts that are being taught. The art teacher may guide the children through conceptual work with clay, then by painting, then with music, and finally by making a story. The art teacher also challenges each child to venture beyond the boundary of his or her knowledge in order to explore more divergent ideas, and will encourage exploration without being focused on the physical outcome.
Studio
The art studio is stocked with art materials ranging from various paint mediums, charcoal pencils, ink brayers, collage materials, music, instruments and many other supplies. It is an additional focus of the curriculum to teach art techniques as well as exemplifying the concepts of lesson plans. We believe that technique is important to learn, because children will stop drawing if they feel they have no skill in doing it. The art studio is considered a haven for the creative process and exploration.
Portfolios
All students have an art portfolio where their work is stored and shared with parents. All art is dated and a description of what the child is expressing through concepts learned is written on the back. That way each child’s progress can be tracked in terms of what has been learned and how it is represented in art. There is at least one art show in the year where the child’s best art works are framed and displayed. The pieces are judged not only by the aesthetics of the finished product, but more importantly, through the representation and exploration of the concept being expressed.