EP

Learning Experiences in children

Malodree Johnson

EP002: Plans Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum

Instructor: Carol Todd

April 21st, 2020

The theme of the learning experiences: Field Trip to the Local Factory

Only double space your paper.

Foundations of Lesson Plan

The learning experience will cover the following content areas math, art, science, and social studies. During the field trip, the children will take part in activities that will touch on each of the subjects. The developmental domains in this field trip will include physical, cognitive and social domains. The cognitive domain will include (researching, counting, and collecting), the physical domain will involve fine motor skills which the children will use in mapping, and the social domains will involve the children talking about their experience on the field trip.

State/District/Professional Standards

2013 Illinois Early Learning and Developmental Standards (Zinsser, Weissberg, & Dusenbury, 2013).

Mathematics: will involve tallying, classifying, and sorting

Science: will involve observation and exploration

Social studies: will involve architectural designs, role play

Art: will involve drawing architectural designs and industry personnel.

Learning goals

The young graders will have these set goals for them during the field trip.

The students will tally and match architectural designs during the field trip

The students will sort the architectural designs of each kind together

The students will observe workers in a local company doing their specific tasks

The students will draw what they learned during the field trip

The students will role-play the tasks of the workers from the local factory

Materials/Technology/Equipment/Resources

For the field trip, these are the materials and resources vital to the success of the trip

Name tags for the students and teachers during the field trip

Emergency and safety equipment e.g. consent by a parent for emergency care for their children, first aid supplies, paper towels, hand sanitizers, bottled water, etc.

Special materials and arrangements for students with special needs.

Books about field trips.

Camera for taking photos.

Transportation means

Foodstuff for the trip

Introduction/Anticipatory Set

The initial step is to identify the student’s familiarity with field trips. This can be done by asking the students simple questions about the various places they visit with their parents on holidays. Introducing the students to questions like why are we going to the local factory? What do we hope to learn during the field trip? In advance to the trip will prepare the students and get them ready and eager for the trip. The teacher can improve the connection to the students by teaching on related topics. Discussing the objectives of the trip with the students will give them an idea of what to expect.

Familiarizing the students with the materials to be used for the field trip will go a long way in improved experience and efficiency of the field trip. Introducing a bulletin board, instructional displays, and interest centers are a great way to capture the student’s attention, raise their interest, and help them to relate the field trip to the learning standards and communities. Encouraging the students to reminisce about the field trip will also improve their readiness for the trip. To relate the learning experience to the student’s prior knowledge, I will develop a field trip web. This field trip web will improve focus thinking. Questions that will be answered during the trip can also be raised and developed at this stage (Roure, et al 2006).

Building/Applying Knowledge and Skills

The first activity to carry out during the field trip will be identifying the architectural designs along the way. This includes houses, buildings, homes, and corporate buildings. The task for this event will be tallying these architectural designs. The children will be provided with tallying sheets where they are allowed to count and record the architectural designs. The content area for this activity is math and social studies. The students are allowed to identify, count, and tally up to ten buildings. The tallying process is targeted to take place mainly during the trip to the local factory. This tallying process will make use of the math content area as the students will improve their counting skills. The field trip is also a social experience for the students. This will social aspect taps into the social studies content of students interacting with other members of society. The developmental domains incorporated by this activity are the cognitive and social domains. Students will engage in research, identification, tallying, and collecting data which taps into their cognitive functions. The student’s interactions and cooperation will tap into the social domain. This activity will finesse the students counting skills as well as interpersonal skills. The students will sort the architectural designs into categories of houses, homes, corporate buildings, and other buildings. This is a cognitive process that will assist the students to tone their observation skills. This activity can be differentiated to meet the needs of students with special needs by including pictorial tally sheets with clear images of the buildings to be tallied (Levy, 2008).

The next activity during the field trip will be the observation of the local industry specialists perform their tasks. This task is crucial and intricate because it demands the keen observation attention from the students. Students can at this point ask the questions they had prepared before the field study. The content area of this task involves science and social studies which is a major learning standard for the students. The students can identify the process of product produced in a factory. The basic science lessons are supplemented to great lengths when the students identify firsthand how it happens. The students are urged on the importance of this task because it will aid in the completion of the third task which includes role playing and art activities. The student’s interaction with professional practitioners improves the social developmental domain in the students. The camera from the materials brought to the field trip can be used to record important scenes while at the factory. This will act as a great retrieval tool when the students get back to school. In this task the students will record the mode of attire by the industry personnel, the various tasks each professional performs, and the differentiation from these various tasks is critical for the role-playing session in the third task. This activity can be differentiated for students with disabilities by adjusting the observation time frames for the cognitively dysfunctional students. These exceptional students can be allocated fewer observation times spread over a long period. This will improve the concentration span of these exceptional students (Savage, 1993). 

The final learning experience in the field trip to the factory will involve role-playing and an art activity. The students will identify the various professionals and workers at the factory. The students will then replicate the factory scene back in class where each student will assume a certain role they identified. The next step after identification is for the students to enact the various roles and tasks the industry personnel performed. This task will make use of the cognitive and social developmental domains in the students. The memory retrieval of the tasks the industry personnel performed by the students will improve their remembrance capabilities while in class and other subjects. The other task in this learning experience is an art activity that will involve the students drawing the various items and elements they identified during the field trip. Whether it be architectural designs, vehicles, industrial machinery, and personnel. The students are allowed to be dynamic and creative. This task will utilize the student’s cognitive and physical domains. The student’s motor skills are finessed while the student’s memory and cognitive functions are enhanced. The differentiation strategy the teacher can use for exceptional students is to allow them to access the images for the art activity from the camera images taken during the field trip. This way, the exceptional students can easily remember the field trip activities and choose which one to draw.

Assessment

Observation is the major tool used in the assessment of the students learning process. The students tallying process will be observed and the conclusion recorded into the register. This will aid in identifying the student's ability to transfer mathematical equations out of class. An observation checklist will be essential for storing the record of which students had an easy time tallying the architectural designs and also identify the students who had a hard time tallying the architectural designs. Another assessment method is the use of the field trip web which contained assessment questions. Some of these questions include the research questions asked to the industry professionals during the observation learning experience. This field trip web is important in identifying what the children understood from the observation activity (Hara, & Kling, 2001).

Another effective assessment model is the use of photos taken from the field trip. The photos will be used to assess the various instances and events that occurred during the field trip. The pictures will be used to talk about what is taking place in each photo. The children can provide their ideas about what is happening. The teacher can include some advanced creativity tasks by asking the students to draw an imagery photo of tasks and events that were not captured in any of the photos.

Closure

The field trip learning experience is a great way to capture multiple content areas and developmental domains. This learning experience made use of the children’s cognitive, physical, and social domains. Tallying tasks of identifying and counting architectural designs improved the student’s cognitive comprehension of mathematical figures. Moreover, the observation process will enhance the student’s social skills when they interact with industry personnel. Content areas like math, social studies, and art are enhanced in the learning experience of taking a field trip to a local industry. The student’s participation in role-playing enhances their social developmental domains because they can identify with the various roles of professionals in their community.

The various closure activities that can be conducted for this learning experience are creating and designing a hallway display of the field trip events and ideas that were learned during the trip. This will help the students who did not attend the trip to grasp something from the trip. Additionally, the students together with the teacher can write thank you letters to the local industry and personnel thanking them for the granted chance to learn at their premises. The students may also include original drawings of their experiences into the letters to the industry personnel. This would make the industry men and women happy.

a. How the learning experiences, taken as a whole, reflect at least three indicators of effective curriculum

The learning experiences i.e. tallying of architectural designs, observation of industry personnel at work, and role-play of industry personnel and drawing of the elements identified during the field trip by the students touched on student motivation guidance by teachers, professional development opportunities, and efficient leadership and supervision. The students are motivated to participate in the field trip by the teacher.

b. How the learning experiences reflect appropriate learning standards and the goals identified by the early childhood teacher you interviewed.

2013 Illinois learning standard includes content areas like social studies, physical development, and health, the arts, language arts, mathematics. The learning experiences used to make use of the content areas of mathematics (tallying and counting), social studies (role play), science (observation and exploration), and arts (drawing activity).

c. How knowledge of the children and families informed the learning experiences.

The student’s lack of attendance to local industries informed the teacher of the learning experience for the children. The children get professional advice from real practitioners in the field.

d. How learning experiences promote language and literacy.

The children’s interaction with each other during the field trip improved their literacy level and pronunciation. The student’s interaction with industry personnel provides real-life attributes of employment work.

f. How the learning experiences promote learning in the arts

The students drawing the events and elements that took place during the school trip improve learning in the arts while in school. The student’s motor skills are also improved.

g. How learning experiences promote social, emotional, and physical development.

Interaction with industry personnel and the general community helps the students understand and recognize the existence of a whole new world out there. Field trips also improve physical development through exercises conducted on the field trip.

h. How the assessment strategies used in the learning experiences informed your understanding of children’s learning and development

Observation used helped to identify the slower students in the tallying process, the use of the field trip web helps identify if the students understood the purpose of the learning experience.

i. How to play is incorporated into your learning experiences and why this is a vital component of the early childhood curriculum

Play is incorporated through the use of role-play which is one of the learning experiences in the study. The students implement and enact the roles they observed and identified from the industry personnel. Play is important because it improves the cognitive and physical functioning of the students.

j. How the learning experiences you planned can be differentiated to meet the needs of individual children, including those with exceptionalities (Note: Include a description of at least two strategies.

Students who lost concentration easily during the observation process were allowed observation breaks to allow them to rejuvenate. This breaks helped the students to be concentrative throughout the field trip. Also, students with art issues and retrieval problems are issued with real photos from the even to help them draw their findings.

k. How you collaborated to develop the learning experiences, including:

i. An explanation of the value of collaborating in the curriculum planning process

Collaboration provides an extensive overview of ideas on learning experiences. Teacher collaboration also helps them overcome challenges faced during new learning experiences.

ii. A description of any challenges you experienced

Challenges in such a field trip are weather i.e. when it rains during the field trip. lack of enough personnel to look over and monitor the children during the field trip.

iii. An example of ways you compromised, demonstrated respect, and/or shared responsibility to develop the learning experience

Delegation of responsibilities to assistants during the field trip will allow the teacher to take photos in the field trip event.

References

Levy, H. M. (2008). Meeting the needs of all students through differentiated instruction: Helping every child reach and exceed standards. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues, and Ideas, 81(4), 161-164.

Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M., Millard, D., Michaelides, D., ... & De Roure, D. (2006, June). The literacy field trip: using UbiComp to support children's creative writing. In Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Interaction design and children (pp. 17-24).

Zinsser, K. M., Weissberg, R. P., & Dusenbury, L. (2013). Aligning Preschool through High School Social and Emotional Learning Standards: A Critical and Doable Next Step. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Savage, G. M. (1993). U.S. Patent No. 5,202,680. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2001). Student distress in web-based distance education. Educause Quarterly, 24(3), 68-69.

Learning Experience Plan Template

Foundations of Lesson Plan

Content Areas and Developmental Domains Identify the content area(s) and developmental domain(s) you will address in this learning experience. 1–2 paragraphs

State/District/Professional Standards Identify one early learning standard that informed your planning of this learning experience. 1–2 sentences

Learning Goals Briefly describe your goal(s) or desired outcome(s) of the learning experience. 1 paragraph

Materials/Technology/Equipment/Resources List texts, websites, writing/art supplies, props/artifacts, assistive technology, computer software, Internet resources, audio/visual media, and other tools and materials needed for this experience. Length will vary.

Lesson Sequence Align all activities with the standard(s), goal(s), and context.

Introduction/Anticipatory Set

Describe initial teacher-and-child activities that establish a warm connection and capture children’s attention. Answer the following: · How will you build a sense of relationship and connection with children during the introduction? · How will you relate the lesson to children’s interests, prior knowledge, and families/communities? 2–3 paragraphs

Building/Applying Knowledge and Skills

Describe specifically, and in a step-by-step fashion, what you and the children will do in all activities and transitions that are part of this learning experience. Make sure each activity is meaningful and supports your goal(s). Be sure to consider specific content areas and developmental domains that are relevant to the learning experience. For each activity, explain how the activity might be differentiated to meet the needs of individual children, including children with exceptionalities. Give specific examples related to particular children in the classroom that you observed. 3–5 paragraphs

Assessment

Assessment is the process by which early childhood professionals gain understanding of children’s development and learning. Describe strategies you will use to assess children’s learning. Consider how you will: · Utilize and document observation to assess children’s learning. · Make sure all assessments are aligned with your goal(s) for the lesson. 2–3 paragraphs

Closure

Learning Activities: Closure is the conclusion of your learning experience. It is a time to wrap up the experience by summarizing, reviewing, and/or reflecting on the learning that has taken place. Describe all activities and strategies you will use in the closure of your learning activity. 1–2 paragraphs

Learning Experience Plan Template

Foundations of Lesson Plan

Content Areas and Developmental Domains Identify the content area(s) and developmental domain(s) you will address in this learning experience. 1–2 paragraphs

State/District/Professional Standards Identify one early learning standard that informed your planning of this learning experience. 1–2 sentences

Learning Goals Briefly describe your goal(s) or desired outcome(s) of the learning experience. 1 paragraph

Materials/Technology/Equipment/Resources List texts, websites, writing/art supplies, props/artifacts, assistive technology, computer software, Internet resources, audio/visual media, and other tools and materials needed for this experience. Length will vary.

Lesson Sequence Align all activities with the standard(s), goal(s), and context.

Introduction/Anticipatory Set

Describe initial teacher-and-child activities that establish a warm connection and capture children’s attention. Answer the following: · How will you build a sense of relationship and connection with children during the introduction? · How will you relate the lesson to children’s interests, prior knowledge, and families/communities? 2–3 paragraphs

Building/Applying Knowledge and Skills

Describe specifically, and in a step-by-step fashion, what you and the children will do in all activities and transitions that are part of this learning experience. Make sure each activity is meaningful and supports your goal(s). Be sure to consider specific content areas and developmental domains that are relevant to the learning experience. For each activity, explain how the activity might be differentiated to meet the needs of individual children, including children with exceptionalities. Give specific examples related to particular children in the classroom that you observed. 3–5 paragraphs

Assessment

Assessment is the process by which early childhood professionals gain understanding of children’s development and learning. Describe strategies you will use to assess children’s learning. Consider how you will: · Utilize and document observation to assess children’s learning. · Make sure all assessments are aligned with your goal(s) for the lesson. 2–3 paragraphs

Closure

Learning Activities: Closure is the conclusion of your learning experience. It is a time to wrap up the experience by summarizing, reviewing, and/or reflecting on the learning that has taken place. Describe all activities and strategies you will use in the closure of your learning activity. 1–2 paragraphs

Learning Experience Plan Template

Foundations of Lesson Plan

Content Areas and Developmental Domains Identify the content area(s) and developmental domain(s) you will address in this learning experience. 1–2 paragraphs

State/District/Professional Standards Identify one early learning standard that informed your planning of this learning experience. 1–2 sentences

Learning Goals Briefly describe your goal(s) or desired outcome(s) of the learning experience. 1 paragraph

Materials/Technology/Equipment/Resources List texts, websites, writing/art supplies, props/artifacts, assistive technology, computer software, Internet resources, audio/visual media, and other tools and materials needed for this experience. Length will vary.

Lesson Sequence Align all activities with the standard(s), goal(s), and context.

Introduction/Anticipatory Set

Describe initial teacher-and-child activities that establish a warm connection and capture children’s attention. Answer the following: · How will you build a sense of relationship and connection with children during the introduction? · How will you relate the lesson to children’s interests, prior knowledge, and families/communities? 2–3 paragraphs

Building/Applying Knowledge and Skills

Describe specifically, and in a step-by-step fashion, what you and the children will do in all activities and transitions that are part of this learning experience. Make sure each activity is meaningful and supports your goal(s). Be sure to consider specific content areas and developmental domains that are relevant to the learning experience. For each activity, explain how the activity might be differentiated to meet the needs of individual children, including children with exceptionalities. Give specific examples related to particular children in the classroom that you observed. 3–5 paragraphs

Assessment

Assessment is the process by which early childhood professionals gain understanding of children’s development and learning. Describe strategies you will use to assess children’s learning. Consider how you will: · Utilize and document observation to assess children’s learning. · Make sure all assessments are aligned with your goal(s) for the lesson. 2–3 paragraphs

Closure

Learning Activities: Closure is the conclusion of your learning experience. It is a time to wrap up the experience by summarizing, reviewing, and/or reflecting on the learning that has taken place. Describe all activities and strategies you will use in the closure of your learning activity. 1–2 paragraphs