What does emergent curriculum truly mean anyway? Quite often it is a challenging topic to discuss let alone interpret to those looking in from the outside. As I have experienced, emergent curriculum is simply placing the child at center focus. One must become mindful of the child's thoughts, giving them the upmost importance during curriculum planning. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maria Montessori amongst many others advocated the awareness one must have towards the child when developing curriculum. Emergent Curriculum allows for the child to lead the direction in which learning is journeying through. We as educators facilitate and scaffold throughout this process as we provoke thoughts, ideas, language and creativity through play and the use of a variety of materials.
To further explore these ideas I have gathered pictures of provocations I have placed out throughout the last couple weeks.
We can see here that children are given an opportunity to explore natural materials through their senses. This allows for questions such as;
How does this feel?
What does it smell like?
Where do you think it comes from?
Do you see any patterns?
Another example of this;
Loose parts allow for children to manipulate an array of materials to build, sort, count, and categorize.
Lastly, emergent curriculum is an ongoing process, "projects" are wonderful learning opportunities and allows for building on learning to occur.
Comments
Post a Comment