One Year Blogging!

This is my 52nd blog post about learning and teaching in Kindergarten. The collection of posts here in Ruby Tuesday have been a way for me to document my insights, connections, learning and reflections throughout my first year teaching Kindergarten. Routinely, a new post was published each Tuesday, and each one contained gems that were significant to me in my learning journey, and that I thought might be of use to others. Ruby Tuesday (named also for my love of music) is documentation that I have gone back to and will continue to go back to. 

There are many threads that run through the posts. Values I had before teaching Kindergarten have been upheld and affirmed - conceptual learning, inquiry, deep thinking and a commitment to the philosophy of the PYP (Primary Years Programme). Other ideas have become rich inquiries for me. I have spent the past year deepening my understanding about, playing with, wondering about, wrestling with and genuinely intrigued by play and playful learning, loose parts, documentation and theory building. 

It is interesting to look back at the statistics showing the number of 'hits' for the blog. It's amazing to see that Ruby Tuesday has had over 8000 hits. The most popular post by far was about mathematics in Kindergarten. Other posts that attracted a lot of readers include:

- Winsome (a post about Kath Murdoch's children's book and how it sparked curiosity in the classroom)

- Buzz Words: Theory in Practice (a post about spending the day in Anne van Dam's classroom in The Netherlands)

- Beyond Free Play in Kindergarten (a post recognising the importance of play and playful learning)

- Think Big! (a post about conceptual learning)

The image below is hyperlinked to Miro to show a mind-map of the posts I have written in the past year - the full collection of Ruby Tuesday. In Miro, each post's title is hyperlinked to the original post. 


As life-long learners, where are you in your learning journey? What are you inquiring into? What are you curious about?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mixed Emotions (3 and 4 year olds)

Image
Mixed Emotions This blog post is going to be used to add a brief daily entry based on a different emotion in response to my current inquiry into learning and teaching with 3 and 4 year olds. Keeping the spirit of Ruby Tuesday, I will share a 'gem' I have noticed or discovered in each entry (how fitting that it is a Tuesday that I am starting this journalling!), and keeping the reference to the Rolling Stones, this series of entries will be collectively known as 'Mixed Emotions'.   Tuesday, June 25, 2024 - Enlightened                          Belonging I am in London on the first day of my summer holidays, and I have just seen a wonderful musical  Standing at the Sky's Edge. A strong theme of the show is 'belonging' and it resonated with me so strongly as I thought about how many learners at the ages of 3 and 4 are faced with extended time away from their parents and carers and need t...
Read more

Mathematical Thinking in Kindergarten

Image
 Mathematical Thinking Let me start with a series of engagements from my Kindergarten class in the past week as we explored the process of representation using the context of number.  We started with a read aloud of One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab by April Pulley Sayre and Jeff Sayre. The book uses animals' feet (and their combinations) to represent different numbers. The children were then invited to choose their own representations of 1 and 10 initially, and then other numbers. Although all children used a range of representations, they all showed 10 as a collection of ten of whatever they had chosen to represent 1.  The next day, to help the children think mathematically about efficiency in representations, we used the Smartboard to represent numbers in two teams - the "individual squares" team and the "crabs" team. On rotation, one member of each team raced each another to represent numbers such as 60. The children had opportunities to communicate what they n...
Read more

Play and Inquiry

Image
Play and Inquiry Imagine a car driven by curiosity and wonder to journey beyond, AND/OR by pleasure to be immersed in a state and flow of ‘the now’ to wallow and savour that moment in time. Two fuel gauges - one for inquiry, the other for play.  Most of the time, both curiosity and pleasure bring fuel to the fire,  but it is possible that it is mostly one, or even one alone! I do not see them in competition with each other. They are sources of energy to light a fire in each and every learner, for them to be excited about the infinite opportunities to play and inquire way beyond the space and time of ‘school’.  The car’s registration plate is P71 NQU1 RYAY. The car navigates a space of intrigue with secret caves, rare birds, a graffiti wall, an archaeological site, a time machine and a laboratory among its many features. The space invites play in many ways including bubbles, a forest, a beach, a rainbow and a visit to LPC - Loose Parts City!  Illustrated by ...
Read more