youngest baby sits on a caregiver’ s lap and gazes at a ball the teacher holds. He activates his arms but does not reach for the ball with intention.
These observations give Carly the idea to vary the kinds of balls offered. She chooses some that make sounds when shaken and some with different textures. Carly observes babies watching as their peers shake balls to make sounds and explore the balls’ textures with their hands and mouths. As they play, she labels their explorations with words like smooth, bumpy, blue, yellow, jingly, and noisy. She asks questions(“ Do you like the bumpy one?”) and describes how the babies respond to the balls(“ You like to put the smooth ball in your mouth. You dropped the bumpy one. Maybe it didn’ t feel good in your hands?”).
Carly wonders if she can extend this activity to nurture emerging social and emotional skills. She and her co-teacher sit across from each other, each with a baby on their laps. They roll the balls back and forth to one another, then begin to hand the balls to the older babies to see if they will hand them back.
Scaffolding and intentionality are not separate strands in our work. Rather, they move hand-in-hand as a braided approach to engaging with infants and toddlers. mastery while also shifting strategies if their initial efforts are ignored or misunderstood( Renninger & List 2012).
For example, in the vignette above, Carly had to consider many factors as she implemented the ball exploration. First, she considered the developmental capacities of the babies in her classroom; specifically, their motor abilities and sensory-driven approaches to learning and exploration. Next, she chose balls with different properties( texture, sound, size). She then considered the setting in which to offer the ball activity and the rich descriptive language she could use to describe the babies’ explorations. She also made the decision to introduce a structured activity when she initiated rolling the ball back and forth with the children.
As infants and toddlers begin to master new skills, educators can build on each child’ s individual capacities and create opportunities for them to choose, act, and construct knowledge about the world around them( Salmon & Barrera 2021). As they adjust the way they scaffold explorations, they must consider a child’ s emerging skills, how a very young child’ s brain is developing through rich and responsive interactions, and what activities will support this emerging development( Schiller 2007). While they observe infants and toddlers exploring the environment through their play, educators should also continually ask
› What new learning am I seeing? › What does this child need from me right now? › How can I best offer that?
ROCKING & ROLLING
As defined by NAEYC, scaffolding is“ a process through which educators intentionally support children’ s development and learning by offering help( in the form of interactions and materials) at the right time and in the right way”( NAEYC 2022, 15). This approach invites teachers to make many invisible but important decisions that provide learners with the support necessary to eventually perform a task or skill independently. As they scaffold, educators must continuously adjust their support to promote children’ s independence and
Intentionality Throughout the Day
Sylvia gathers the babies in her room to watch the rain fall outside the window. Seeing how entranced and delighted they are, she wonders how to extend this delight into a learning experience. She decides to use a watering can to
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