We do our planning so that we can help the kids reach the five outcomes in the Early
Years Learning Framework and we do a lot of our planning around stories, and I do a lot
of learning through stories. Well, it all stems from the children's interest
and at the moment we're looking at the Wombat Stew.
Wombat stew. And who are all the animals in our story?
Wombat stew. We've got a wombat.
Wombat. There's our wombat.
Emu. The emu.
During one of our yarning circles one of our students got up just out of the blue and started
talking about that her family came from Africa, which got all the other kids talking about
where they were from. Some of the kids said they were from Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne,
and I thought well, to explore those places we'll look at Possum Magic. And then through
reading the Possum Magic book, we did all the different cooking and the kids got to
taste it. And then that come into the Australian animals, because they were just really intrigued
by the koalas and the possums, and what better book to use than Wombat Stew.
And we're going to make the wombat stew as we read our story. One day on the banks of
a billabong, a very clever dingo caught a - what did he catch?
He gets a fish. What is it? A wombat. Wombat.
For parents, because when they come in every
day, they're not going to be actually standing there when they're signing in reading my planning,
because it's just teacher jargon. So what I did to overcome that was to - I do a great
big planning sheet just for parents, so that they could see visually. And just simple text
so that when they walk in, they can see exactly what's going on in the room and what are the
children learning, and how does that actually link to learning for the children. So yeah,
it's actually a communication tool for parents.
So we've broken up different parts of the
book that will fit in with all the five learning outcomes. So to achieve children have a strong
sense of identity, we looked at the animals and linked it to different totem areas that
belong to the kids.
Children are connected with, and contribute to, their world.
We looked at doing a bushwalk in the community to pick up all the different
items that made the wombat stew.
For outcome five, children are effective communicators, being able to retell the story,
what's the story about, linking it to other stories maybe
and getting them to maybe even create their own.
Gooey, brewey, yummy, chewy, wombat stew. Oh dingo…
So the process of our planning, we observe the kids throughout the day. In the afternoon
we'll write down stuff on everything that the kids have done, and if there's been a
lot of interest we'll extend on that. So if the kids were interested in the grasshoppers
and the bugs, we'll go off into looking at that. So it's always exploring the kids' interests.
And licked his whiskers, rightio, in they go.
Okay, so we can still do bushwalk and you know, with the gumnuts and stuff, like we
don't have that. So just get the kids to improvise the ingredients. And then we tell them that
at the end, they get to cook a proper stew. So you can relate it to home, like when cooking
a stew at home with mum and dad, you know what do we use instead of gumnuts and leaves.
I mean wouldn't that be funny, the actual animals in the book,
did we eat them as - as a cultural food.
And using the framework that allows us to
really broaden our areas I suppose, to really capture and extend.
Wombat stew, wombat stew, gooey, brewey, yummy, chewy, wombat stew.