Playcentre – whānau-led early childhood education service
This downloadable workshop is designed for Playcentre parents/whānau to stimulate thinking and discussion about being kaiako, weaving a whāriki through Learning Conversations and Learner Maps, and building relationships.
See the Materials that come with this resource to download Downloadable workshop - Playcentre: whānau-led early childhood education service. (.pdf or .ppt)
You can make a copy of the slides if you wish to edit them for your team.
Tips for using downloadable workshop
General/technical
The best way to view the workshop is to enlarge the slideshow by selecting the full screen icon at the bottom of the tool bar.
Use the forward and back arrows to move through the workshop at your own pace.
You can download the workshop, make a copy, and adapt it for your own use, but you must respect copyright, especially of the images and video.
Professional learning
The workshops are best used in a group, in which you can consider and discuss the content and questions.
The workshops focus in on a specific aspect of Te Whāriki, and are designed to help kaiako deepen their understanding and practical application of the curriculum.
They offer a brief overview or short introduction.
You may choose to use the workshops in facilitated sessions and in specific ways for your context. For example, you might:
- work together on a complete workshop in a team meeting or professional development session
- select parts of a workshop to spend more time on, completing it over a number of sessions
- select parts of a workshop to revisit and explore in greater depth.
One of the challenges for me when it comes to embracing spontaneous play is to really let go of my expectations of how I think the session’s going to run.
The kids are really into treasure hunts at the moment. Last week, one of the grown-ups sneaked in the night before and hid some treasure in the sandpit for the kids to find the next day. The next day we were really expecting the session to be in the sandpit – lots of digging, maybe we play pirates, maybe we make treasure boxes. You know, lots of ideas of how to extend on this game.
The kids were really excited but only for a couple of minutes really. Then they decided that finding treasure was actually quite hard. One of the kids decided that she wanted to make a robot to find the treasure for her.
She recruited a whole bunch of other kids and they all went inside. Actually, for the next hour they built robots, and there were boxes and hot glue. It was brilliant and it was just not what I was expecting. In fact, I don't even think most of those robots even made it back into the sandpit.
So I think it just took me a while to click into the new game and then look at different ways to help them and support them with that. You know what resources can we find and where are we going to take robots, where are robots going to take us? So I guess it is great for me to learn to wholeheartedly follow where the kids are going to lead us.
About this resource
This downloadable workshop is designed for Playcentre parents/whānau to stimulate thinking and discussion about being kaiako, weaving a whāriki through Learning Conversations and Learner Maps, and building relationships. The workshop focuses in on a specific aspect of Te Whāriki and is designed to help kaiako deepen their understanding and practical application of the curriculum