Interacting with Children in the Environment

Observing

Observation is critical in helping you to determine children’s interests, development, dispositions, and need for support. The information gained assists you in building relationships with children, choosing relevant materials and activities, and evaluating how classroom spaces are used. Close observation will also assist you in determining your immediate role. Is it to observe children’s play, to scaffold learning for an individual child or small group, to become a play partner, or to roam the room providing needed assistance?

Scaffolding or Supporting Children’s Learning

We can scaffold children’s learning in a variety of ways including modeling, asking open-ended questions, providing new language, presenting additional information, offering additional materials, and through being a play partner. However, when we scaffold children’s learning, we must always be careful not to inadvertently interrupt or redirect their play (Sluss, 2005). We will examine each of these forms of scaffolding individually.

Modeling

There are many situations where children can be assisted in learning through a more competent model. For example, you might model the use of a tool (spoon, hammer), technique (stacking two blocks, using a slip to join two pieces of clay), social skill (modeling a gentle touch to a toddler, using conflict resolution steps with a preschool child), physical skill (hopping, yoga position), or cognitive skills (using one-to-one correspondence, tagging items as you count them).

Asking Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions encourage multi-word responses that have more than one correct answer. Open-ended questions invite conversation, require thinking and problem solving, and ask children to share ideas, theories, thoughts, emotions, and reasoning (Kostelnik, Whiren, Soderman, & Gregory, 2009). In contrast, closed-ended questions often ask the child to recall factual information, answer a yes or no question, or state a preference. The child typically answers the closed question in one or a few words. The below table provides examples of both types of questions.

Closed Questions	Open Questions
What shape is this?	What are the ways that circles and ovals are the same or different?
What color is the bird?	Why do you think the bird is brown?
Should we skip or hop across the room?	What are other ways that we can move across the room?
Is this a moth or butterfly?	How are the butterfly and the moth the same? How are they different?
Will the salt affect the ice?	What are ways that we can make the ice melt faster?
Can you make applesauce from apples?	What are other things that we could make with the apples?

Using Rich, Descriptive Language and New Vocabulary

As you interact with children, you can insert descriptive language and introduce children to new vocabulary. Each center and each activity have unique vocabulary associated with them. For example, when the teacher at Discovery Bay Childcare changed the dramatic play center to a garage, the children learned many new words including mechanic, automobile, carburetor, dial, gear, and engine. When the teacher later changed the area to a hospital, there was a new set of vocabulary: immunization, x-ray, anesthesiologist, and physician.

Children begin school with a vast difference in the number of words in their vocabulary. For example, in one study the total number of words children heard before the age of 4 was 13 million for children who were from low-income homes versus 45 million for children from the highest economic group (Hart & Risley, 1995). This has a profound effect on the children’s later success in schooling. However, as an early childhood teacher you have the opportunity to help change this statistic by exposing children to rich, descriptive language in the way that they learn best, in an authentic context.

Encouraging Language by Using Parallel Talk, and Expanding and Extending Speech

You can use parallel talk with young children to describe what the child is doing or what you are doing. For example, “Oh, you are laying your baby down so it can go to sleep.” “You are stacking two blocks.” “I am going to get a clean diaper for you now.” To increase the child’s vocabulary you might also expand the child’s sentence. For example, the child says, “Baby sleep,” and you might say, “Yes, you are rocking your baby to sleep.” When extending the child’s speech you add additional information and model appropriate grammar, sentence structure, and pronunciation. For example, when a child says, “I have a truck,” you might respond, “Yes; you have a shiny, red, dump truck.”

Presenting Additional Information and Enhancing Children’s Background Knowledge

When the teacher has background information about a topic, she can naturally introduce information during interactions with children. For example, Tom has a butterfly and moth in his classroom. Garmai and Amberly are looking at them. Tom mentions that the butterfly is called a monarch and that it can fly over 2000 miles. He tells Amberly that this is how far she flies when she visits her grandmother. Amberly says, “But I am in a big plane, and the butterfly is flying with just its own wings. It must get really tired.”

Assisting Children to Carefully Observe and Reflect Upon Their Learning

Teachers assist children to observe and reflect in many ways. Tom says to Garmai and Amberly, “Look at the butterfly’s and moth’s antennas.” The children carefully observe through magnifying glasses, noting that the butterfly has a round club at the end of its antenna while the moth does not. Tom lets them know that this is one way that you can tell moths and butterflies apart. Later Tom asks the children if they would like to draw the butterfly and moth, providing the children a way to demonstrate and reflect upon what they learned.

Offering Additional Materials

Children may need additional materials to move to the next step in a project or to think or create in new ways. Julio is building a play guitar at the woodworking center and wants to make the guitar strings. Anne, his teacher, provides some fishing line for him. Jonathon and Saleena are building a multi-level block structure. The teacher provides a pulley, allowing the children to build an elevator in their building. Teachers can also ask the children what materials they think would help them to complete their project.

Being a Play Partner

The younger the child, the more time the adult will spend as the child’s play partner. In most cases, you will want to follow the child’s lead, engaging in give and take actions and communication (Post & Hohmann, 2000). Azura, a teacher in a toddler classroom, sits with Lisa and Torrence pretending to eat lunch. Lisa pretends to pour Azura and Torrence milk. Azura says “thank you”; Torrence then also says “thank you.”

Supporting Peer Interactions

As a teacher, you may need to assist children to solve conflicts they are unable to resolve themselves, to interpret and provide words for children’s actions, and to help children enter play. Children who are successful in play entry often begin as onlookers watching the other children play. This allows them to understand the play, the roles, and the plot. They often begin entry by playing next to the group, engaging in a parallel activity. Teachers can assist children to enter play by scaffolding, modeling, giving children desirable props, suggesting roles, or entering the play with the child.

Acknowledging Learners

We acknowledge learners when we show a sincere interest in what they are doing, document and display their work, and use encouraging language. Encouraging statements reflect the child’s effort, provide very specific information, encourage the child’s judgment on his work rather than your own, and often lead to further interaction. Encouragement can boost children’s self-confidence, persistence, and acceptance of their own and other’s efforts (Gartrell, 2007).

In contrast, praise tends to be more generic, focusing on the completed product, and on the adult’s judgment about the product. Praise may lead children to feel “conditional acceptance” (Gartrell, 2007, p. 254). Instead of developing intrinsic or internal satisfaction with what one has done, frequent praise can make children dependent on external acknowledgement, making them think they are only worthwhile when someone else states they are. For example, a Head Start teacher, Tanya, shared with me her rude awakening to the dangers of praise. Each day, when Laurie entered the classroom Tanya told her how pretty she looked. When Laurie went to kindergarten, she came home and told her mother “I’m ugly.” Her mother was stunned and asked Laurie why she thought so. Laurie said, “Mrs. Taylor never tells me I’m pretty, so she must think I’m ugly.” Laurie had become conditioned to praise and without it, she did not feel worthwhile. It is important to acknowledge learners, but to be cautious with praise. The below table provides examples of praise and encouragement.

Praise	Encouragement
Good job.	This is the first time you've completed the entire puzzle. I bet you feel proud.
I like the way you cleaned up.	You are working very hard putting away all the blocks.
Great artwork.	I see that you put a lot of detail in your picture, like adding all the branches on the tree. That must have taken a long time.

Helping Children Engage in Sustained Play

Some children have a difficult time beginning or sustaining play. It is helpful if teachers have children make a plan before the play period, offer a child a choice between activities, and make sure that there are activities that have high appeal to the child. It is also important to examine the environment to make sure that it is not visually overwhelming, that there are clear divisions between centers to reduce distractions, and that noise levels are controlled.

Reminding Children of the Rules

Reminders of rules may be especially needed when children are new to your classroom. Studies have found that teachers who spend more time at the beginning of the year helping children learn the rules and routines have a greater number of children who are actively engaged later in the year (Guthrie, 2000). Often you will be reminding children of interaction rules. For example, when Nancy grabs Salena’s truck, you might say, “Salena is playing with the dump truck right now. Do you want to get a different truck or do you want to ask Salena if you can play with her?” You may also need to remind children of rules that assist in keeping the room orderly, “You need to put the puzzles away when you are done using them.” Children might also need reminders about the appropriate use of equipment and materials, “The sand needs to stay in the table. When sand gets thrown it can get in someone’s eyes and that really hurts.”

Intervening When Needed to Provide for Safe Play

It is important to intervene if children are hurting each other physically or emotionally. You must also make sure that children are not engaging in behaviors that could seriously injure them. However, as stated by Greenman (2005b), we must be very thoughtful about when to intervene.

The drive to protect our children is profound and easily can lead to cleansing their lives of challenge and depth. Early childhood is a time when children begin to live in the world and hopefully learn to love the world. They can’t do this when fenced off from the messy richness of life to live in a world of fluorescent lights and plastic toys, two-dimensional glowing screens, and narrow teaching instruction. Scrubbing and polishing raw experience in the name of health and safety scrapes away the natural luster and meaning of childhood. Many of the wonders and joys of childhood that fuel the best in our adult selves are birthed in the unavoidable messes, bumps, bruises, and tears that come with exuberant exploration. (Greenman, 2005b, p. 7)

Documenting Learning

Another important role of the adult is to document children’s individual and group learning. You might capture children’s play through anecdotal records (brief, focused descriptions of a situation), photos, transcriptions of their conversations, tape recordings, video recordings, samples of their work, and so forth. Documentation can enhance children’s learning by making their learning visible, by demonstrating that we take their ideas and work seriously, and through allowing children and teachers to “revisit” ideas (Katz & Chard, 1996, pp. 3–4). It promotes teacher’s planning and evaluation with children, supplies information for communicating with parents, provides a history of the school, and can become a powerful tool for advocacy (Katz & Chard, 1996).