Aistear irish early years curriculum and te whariki

The pre-instruction and post-instruction interview data suggest that the enacted curriculum and sequence in which the biological knowledge was presented helped the nineteen children in the study to recognize the connections and regularities within the life cycles of the major groupings of animals, and to begin to build scientific biological conceptual models.Framing early years’ curriculum documents and their implementation within poststructuralist theoretical perspectives reconceptualizes curriculum enactments. This was the instructional phase in which children were helped to establish scientifically valid relationships between the invented concept and other biological concepts. The introduction of a biological concept was followed by a series of exploration activities in which children were encouraged to apply the concept invented in the benchmark lesson. The lessons began with what is called benchmark-invention after the historical work of Robert Karplus and the contemporary work of Earl Hunt and Jim Minstrell. The curriculum was designed to build upon children's everyday biological knowledge and through a series of carefully organized lessons to help them to begin to build scientifically valid conceptual models in the area of animal life cycles. This study looked at initiation in a multiage (Grades 1-3) classroom, and the curriculum, design tools, and inquiry acts believed to be necessary precursors of design and planning phases whether the inquiry in which young children engage is archival or laboratory investigation. These are the skills of initiating and planning, performing and recording, analysing and interpreting, and communication and teamwork that map onto what Hodson calls the five phases of scientific inquiry in school science: initiation, design and planning, performance, interpretation, and reporting and communicating. Inquiry in school science, as conceived by the authors of the Common Framework of Science Learning Outcomes K-12, is dependent upon four areas of skills.

Aistear irish early years curriculum and te whariki