The following lists the sub outcomes, examples of evidence when children can achieve each sub outcome and how educators can promote and help children to achieve MTOP Learning Outcome 4 - Children Are Confident And Involved Learners.
School-age children are involved in a wide range of activities throughout the day and they have a greater capacity for independence, self-direction and collaboration. Children are engaged with peers, family and educators and the community in formal and informal learning opportunities.
Learning Outcome 4: Children Are Confident And Involved Learners
4.1 Children develop dispositions such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity
This is evident, for example, when children:
- freely follow and extend their own interests with enthusiasm, curiosity, energy and concentration
- investigate, imagine and explore ideas
- initiate and contribute to play and leisure experiences emerging from their own ideas
- participate in a variety of rich and meaningful inquiry-based experiences
- persevere even when they find a task difficult and experience the satisfaction of achievement
Educators promote this learning by:
- recognise and value children’s involvement in a variety of play experiences
- provide environments that are flexible and open-ended
- respond to children’s dispositions by commenting on them and providing encouragement and additional ideas
- encourage children to engage in both individual and collaborative explorative and reflective processes
- listen carefully to children’s ideas and discuss with them how these ideas might be developed
- model inquiry processes, including observation, curiosity and imagination, try new ideas and take on challenges
- explore the diversity of cultures and social identities
4.2 Children use a range of skills and processes such as problem solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating
This is evident, for example, when children:
- apply a wide variety of thinking strategies to engage with situations and solve problems, and adapt these strategies to new situations
- create and use representation to organise, record and communicate ideas and concepts
- make predictions and generalisations about their daily activities, aspects of the natural world and environments
- manipulate objects and experiment with cause and effect through trial and error
- use reflective thinking to consider why things happen and what can be learnt from these experiences
- show leadership, and follow directions given by other children
- make choices and take control
Educators promote this learning by:
- plan environments with appropriate levels of challenge where children are encouraged to explore, experiment and take appropriate risks
- provide experiences that encourage children to investigate ideas, solve problems and use complex concepts and thinking, reasoning and hypothesizing
- encourage children to communicate and make visible their own ideas and theories
- collaborate with children and model reasoning, predicting and reflecting processes and language
- provide opportunities for children to initiate and lead activities and experiences
4.3 Children transfer and adapt what they have learned from one context to another
This is evident, for example, when children:
- make connections between experiences, concepts and processes
- use the processes of play, reflection and investigation to solve problems
- try out strategies that were effective to solve problems in one situation in a new context
Educators promote this learning by:
- support children applying their learning in new ways and talk about this with them in ways that grow their understanding
- support children to construct multiple solutions to problems and use different ways of thinking
- plan for time and space where children discuss and reflect to see similarities and connections between existing and new ideas
- share and transfer knowledge about children’s understandings from one setting to another, by exchanging information with families and with professionals in other settings
- understand that competence is not tied to any particular language, dialect or culture
4.4 Children resource their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials
This is evident, for example, when children:
- experience the benefits and pleasures of shared exploration of new ideas
- explore the purpose and function of a range of tools, media,
- manipulate resources to investigate, take apart, assemble, invent and construct
- experiment with and use information and communication technologies (ICT) to investigate and problem solve
- explore ideas and theories using imagination and creativity
- use feedback from themselves and others to revise and build on an idea
Educators promote this learning by:
- provide opportunities for choice and collaboration
- involve children in the broader community beyond the school-age care setting
- create possibilities for peer scaffolding
- introduce appropriate tools, technologies and media and provide the skills, knowledge and techniques
- develop their own confidence with technologies available to children in the setting
- provide resources that encourage children to represent their thinking
References:
MTOP Learning Outcomes, Aussie Childcare Network
How Children Can Achieve MTOP Learning Outcomes, Aussie Childcare Network
How Educators Can Promote MTOP Learning Outcomes, Aussie Childcare Network