Examining the NQS within Digital Documentation: Relationships with Children and Families (Quality Area 5 and 6)
Families are childrenās first and most important teachers. From birth, children are learning from those closest to them. When children enter the care environment, the educators within their early childhood centre will have a significant influence on how those children grow and develop. The relationships that exist within an early childhood centre play a crucial role in the educational outcomes that may be achieved.
Giving children a voice in planning their learning environment helps build mutual respect and strong positive relationships. There are many ways to document the childrenās voice and ensure that their ideas are listened to and responded to with the utmost respect. Within Kinderloop there are a number of ways to document childrenās voices. Regular posts may be highlighted using supplied images and tags. Childrenās voices can now be recorded in a variety of methods including text and video and posted directly onto the centreās Kinderloop. This allows educators and families to share ideas and allows educators to track childrenās input to the educational program.
Within the early childhood education environment, a number of educational outcomes are sought each day. This can be done through centre developed programs or externally sourced programs (for example, Playing and Learning to Socialise: PALS, or Munch and Move). These programs work best when children are able to explore the concepts they are learning at school with their family at home. Paper notes with updates are easily lost, and require educators to distribute to families. Using Kinderloop as a communication tool allows immediate sharing of up-to-date progress on educational programs being conducted, allowing families to follow up with children and provide reinforcement of concepts covered. It is also possible to see how many families have seen posts, making tracking the distributed information easy! Comments and feedback may be given by families in real time, when it is possible to families to take time to engage.Ā
This kind of engagement helps deepen relationships with children and families and helps to embed programs in everyday practice.
As a parent, I worry about my daughter when she is at school. As an educator I know that she is safe, learning and having a great time with her peers. I donāt always have time to pick up my daughter and check in with her educators. With Kinderloop, I am able to get a snapshot of her day just about every day. I feel closer to her educators and can give them feedback directly on the posts about things that have happened at home, current interests and developmental milestones. I donāt have to worry about missing notes or special event days because they are all there waiting for me when I check in to Kinderloop. I feel as though I am part of my daughterās time at preschool and have a much stronger relationship with educators than I would otherwise.
Relationships are the medium through which children learn all manner of skills; relating to social, emotional, linguistic and cognitive development. Building bonds across settings takes time and participation from all parties and, above all, communication. Kinderloop provides a two-way communication tool that will help support and strengthen relationships within early childhood care and education settings.
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Examining the NQS within Digital Documentation: Health, Safety and the Physical Environment (Quality Area 2, 3)
Since its introduction, the National Quality Standards have raised the bar for facilities providing care and education for children. The task of documenting your centreās progress and engagement with the quality areas can be a daunting task for leaders and educators alike. Recording evidence, milestones, ideas and progress is easy with Kinderloop!
Providing evidence of regular health and safety checks of the learning environment can require a lot of paperwork. Kinderloop can be used to reduce the volume of paper used to document vital safety checks by laminating a master copy of checklists and taking a photo of them at the end of the week to post onto your centreās private Kinderloop. This reduces the storage required for these records and a quick tag means that they will easily be found for assessment and compliance visits.
Promoting each childās routine, sleep and eating habits may be easily and quickly shared with families using digital documentation. This fosters and supports strong and meaningful relationships with families and shares each aspect of the childās day with their families. Information about healthy lifestyles and eating habits may also be shared using Kinderloop and can help to further foster a sense of community. Why not post a healthy recipe that the children have been enjoying at the centre and invite families to share their favourite recipe?
Environmental intelligence starts in the early years of learning. A sustainability plan could be easily shared with families and educators using digital documentation, allowing for real time feedback and is a great step for reducing the environmental impact of sharing information with families. All areas of the educational program that relate to sustainable practice can also be tagged to allow for easy searching and tracking of projects and wish lists.
Giving the children a voice in their learning environment is a key step to empowering children to take a role in their educational journey. Providing children with opportunities to share their ideas and to create meaningful ways of tracking their exploration through project work can deepen the understanding and engagement in such products. Within Kinderloop, this may be achieved by creating groups or tags for specific projects. These can then be searched and viewed as meaningful documentation for the learning journeys children take when following their interests.
Mind maps can be a great tool for documenting the process of exploring childrenās ideas and possibilities for future planning (read more here). Apps like āSimpleMindā allow for expanding ideas through various branches and promote child and educator engagement, encouraging children to think outside of the norm. Using these in conjunction with Kinderloop allows for an expanding of possibilities on ways of recording childrenās ideas, and opens up possibilities for expressing ideas.
Creating specific groups can also help educators map their ideas for the learning environment and record the observed engagement of children in the areas already available to them in the learning environment. These groups can also be used with the assistance of tags to ensure that interests and areas of focus may be included in future planning for intentional teaching.
Childrenās health and safety and the physical environment are two very important quality areas within the National Quality Standards. Using Kinderloop enables educators to quickly and easily record vital information that will help map progress towards goals and record the voice and ideas of children within the learning environment, taking some of the stress out of providing children with high quality care and education.
Curriculum and educational program: Infinite possibilities!
In every child care educatorās day, there are a significant number of tasks to be completed: engaging in meaningful interactions with the children in our care, completing a myriad of routine tasks, observing the learning of children, and programming the curriculum for the interests and skills observed.
āCurriculum: in the early childhood setting curriculum means āall the interactions, experiences, activities, routines and events, planned and unplanned, that occur in an environment designed to foster childrenās learning and developmentā. [adapted from Te Whariki].ā Early Years Learning Framework.
In many educational settings, the term curriculum and educational program are used interchangeably. All decisions made in the development and ongoing analysis of the educational program may be influenced by the knowledge that educators gain from observing, analysing and assessing the learning, development and interests of the children in their care.
from āEducatorsā Guide to the Early Years Learning Framework for AustraliaāĀ
How each centre and educator presents their observations, planning cycle and curriculum can vary as much as the children attending our centres and will be influenced by the educatorsā philosophies.
How educators have planned for the learning of children has evolved from boxes with learning areas with activities changed daily, to mind maps following interests, to child-focused discussion groups to plan the learning environment and foster engagement.
With the emergence of digital documentation methods, gathering the data required for planning an educational program has never been easier (link to obs post). With your centreās own private Kinderloop, all observations are available to educators to observe and build into the educational program; encompassing the learning environment, intentional teaching moments and projects planned to extend upon interests and skills observed.
Representing the educational program is easy with Kinderloop. There are an abundance of ways to display the program being provided at your centre. Below are just a few ideas on how to display, document and review your curriculum.
Creating Specific Groups
The wonderful thing about Kinderloop is how easy it is to customise using groups and tags. It is possible to create a group for each roomās curriculum. Here educators can post photos of learning environments and add analysis and assessment either through editing the description on the photo or by adding a comment to the photo. Educators are able to add data to the comments if they see a child engaging with an educational area or add links made to observation posts made to individual childrenās Kinderloops.
Creating Mind Maps
Expressing the curriculum as a mind map is another popular option for documenting and assessing the educational program. To keep things simple, there are now apps for your iPad or Tablet which mean that brain storming can be completed on the run on your device!
(Created using SimpleMind)
The mind map can then be saved to your photos and quickly posted to your Kinderloop as either a public or private post. Evaluation can then happen in the comments section. It is also possible to upload documents to your private Kinderloop meaning that supporting documents can be added to your planning documentation.
It is the task of educators to ensure that all children are represented within the curriculum and planning cycle. This is done through observation, analysis and assessment of learning and engagement within the educational environment. How you document your learning program is completely up to you! The tools now available to educators mean that these tasks are getting simpler and the possibilities are only limited by your imagination!
Ok, so you have your chunk of time off the floor to do your āprogrammingā. What do I do?
For most educators this time is precious and jam-packed with expectations! Depending on the centre, educators may have a focus group of children that is their responsibility to observe and program for, or may make a contribution to each childās learning profile.
Generally the term āprogrammingā refers to documenting the learning journey of children. This may include completing observations or learning stories and providing some form of analysis on what has occurred within the observation. The educator will then provide an assessment of the learning, deducing a direction for future planning that may be incorporated into the larger educational program. Programming may also involve completing developmental or learning outcome based checklists that ensure educators are observing children with reference to typical developmental milestones.
Each educator will observe children in slightly different ways, using a variety of different observation types: jottings, anecdotal and running records. Formats and presentation methods for observations will vary from centre to centre and evolve overtime.
When I started as an Advanced Child Care Worker after completing my diploma, programming and planning occurred in the form of learning stories prepared for the families to see. Observations were completed in a full page format, with detailed observation, analysis and assessment of learning, with links to the āNSW Curriculum Framework for Childrenās Servicesā, including references to the various developmental domains of the child. Feedback from families was that they loved the pictures of their children but that all the text was too technical and not very interesting.
With the introduction of the Early Years Learning Framework, the focus of documentation and programming moved away from providing a product for families and towards meaningful and purposeful interactions with children. Programming remained a vital component of planning and providing an educational program for children, but the time spent per observation was reduced, allowing for more time spent engaging. There was still a lot of time spent writing out learning outcomes observed and having to cross reference ideas and observations through big piles of paper.
As I completed my Teaching Degree, I saw the introduction of digital documentation making programming simpler still. Observations can be posted to the centreās private Kinderloop quickly on the floor with children or in down times during the day and added to my programming group (see how here). In my programming time all I have to do is search for observations tagged with my group (generally private posts) and I can analyse and assess the learning of the children observed (either by editing the post or by adding my assessment in the comments section). I donāt have to write out the learning outcomes I have observed any more as it is simple and easy to add a tag to the observation. Developmental areas may also be identified and tagged, making it super fast to complete developmental checklists if required or complete more detailed reports that may be required for external sources (for example for primary schools in the case of those in their last year of preschool).
Linked families have access to all of the observations completed on their child in the form of public (white) posts with a small jotting. I am able to duplicate the posts seen by families and create private (yellow) posts seen only by educators, and add the detail I need to conduct an analysis of learning and development. These private posts can then include the centre based curriculum directions and follow up required under the National Quality Standard and may even include links to the Quality Improvement Plan of the centre, which is often not relevant to families.
Programming is a vital component of the day-to-day running of an early childhood education centre. It can be daunting; with limitless possibilities for representing the learning of children. Kinderloop allows for educators to streamline the programming process, limiting duplicating data and allowing for more time spent implementing the planned program with the children.
Planning
When it comes to planning, reminders are a great way to show links to your thinking in regards to observations set them up on a new online post or in the reminder tab. Another beautifully simple way to achieve this is simply to create a yellow (draft) post with your planning thoughts and tag it with the childās name and create a new learning tag called āPlanningā that way, when you either search for the childās name or the āPlanningā tag you will see your thoughts...
