A Case Study by Flávia Ribeiro
Flavia completed her Teaching Degree in Early Years at Universidade do Minho in her home country of Portugal. Flavia has worked as a Teacher and Family Worker in nursery at Pen Green for the last 18 years. Flavia has a passion for children's schematic play and becoming attuned to children, understanding their innate interests.
Introducing Cara
Cara is four years and 5 months. Cara has been attending our Nursery since September 2021, but had previously been in our baby and toddler provision since the age of 2.
When Cara first started in nursery, she was really interested in sensory activities she displayed strong enveloping and containing schemas. This pattern was visible in the way she explored water, play dough, shaving foam and other sensory textures. The following Learning Story is a reflection of Cara's current interests and concerns, her play is very much focused on exploring symbolically but continuing to explore her main cluster of schemas which are enveloping and containing and more recently transporting and trajectory. Cara, as described by Athey 2007, "is combining schemas to form partial concepts," in particular mathematical ones.
Cara's Learning Journey
Cara, you have a keen interest in playing with babies.
I have been observing you and finding it fascinating, how so much of your baby role play revolves around early concepts of quantity, capacity, size, estimation and area.
You like to choose the small babies, we have a significant amount of them at the moment, they are all similar and equal in size. You like to gather a few of them and arrange them neatly in lines, whether to transport them or to simply put them in bed. You like to try and fit them all in the small prams, arranging and rearranging them until they all fit. You like covering them in blankets, doing a great job of assessing and estimating how the blanket will fit and cover them all.
Observation shows there is also an element of role play, when you are exploring, you have gathered enough knowledge to know and act out how babies are looked after, but you are also learning and exploring early maths concepts such as quantity, size, fit, area, conservation of amount. This hands on approach and intrinsic motivation to learn will hopefully give you the foundation to engage in more complicated maths as you move through the educational system.
Cara I love this picture I just managed to capture it. You spent some time arranging your babies on a blanket as if they were in bed, and proceeded to neatly cover them with another blanket. This was all done with such care and precision, combining your interest in enveloping with early mathematical knowledge of estimation of size and area.
What could we provide you with to extend this:
I wonder if you would like to try wrapping things up with wrapping paper, different size envelopes, Russian dolls or seriated boxes. You might also enjoy the parachute outside and stretchy fabric to explore through dance and movement.