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Creative Dance-Play for Early Childhood 2023, Dance Teaching Ideas, viewed 4 March 2023, <https://danceteachingideas.com/creative-dance-movement-for-toddlers/>.

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I place a keyboard on a table in the kinder room.

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Through the experience of assessment 2 and the course readings, I have discovered that activities do not need to have an end goal, the process is the learning journey. Victor Wooten spoke about how learning music was about exploration, and nothing was forced, the instrument was just there for when he was ready to join in (Music as a Language: Victor Wooten at TEDxGabriolaIsland 2013). I decided to plug the electric keyboard into the wall and leave on a table to observe how the children would interact with it.

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The children naturally gravitated toward the keyboard, hovering hesitently and asking questions "what's this?", "can we play with it?". I reassured the children that they can explore their environment, and they immediately jumped in eager to explore all the buttons of the keyboard.  Not long into exploration, some children found the volume button, we then had a discussion about the room and what level we found to be a 'kind and safe' volume so that the children using the keyboard could still enjoy their experience but not at the expense of the other children in the room. I also had a reflective discussion with an educator after the experience, the educator asked if we could not use the keyboard again, when we unpacked this deeper though the educator only had an issue with the noise not the experience. We compromised to start using the keyboard outside on dry days.

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I placed a basket with small silk material cut offs and scarfs.

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For the exploration of movement my activity was too place a basket in the room with silk scarfs and small flowing pieces of material. The intention is that children can explore movement in different ways through their play. Children best learn through involving their whole body in their exploration of what interests them (Dance Teaching Ideas 2023). Leaving the scarfs for the children to explore invites the children to experiment using their body in different ways through their play.

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The children pulled out all the material from the basket and placed it all around the room, it felt that this was done randomly without cause but on closer observation there was intention in everything the kinder children did. One child used three pieces of material, lying one down on the carpet as a picnic rug, one over the baby she was playing with and one piece of material around her waist. I watched as this child struggled with the way the fan caught the 'picnic rug' and how the child kept trying to move and place the material in different ways to get it to sit the way she wanted it too. My team and I have decided to keep the material in the kinder room as apart of our program because the children interact with them and explored the textures through their play.

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Whilst in the outdoor environment, I kept the shed roller door open for children to self select resources for their play.

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Play is reality, especially for a child, play invites a child’s whole mental self to surrender to the possibility of the impossible (Kilby 2017). If play is an opportunity for children to experience the impossible, they need access to all items that they deem necessary for their play, not the resources that we decide are needed.

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The children loved having the shed open, they eagerly searched the shelves for items that they could use to aid their play. The children were ready to empty all the resources from the shed, which led to a discussion with the children about maintaining a safe environment and how resources needed to be put away correctly so the shed remained safe for children to engage with. We also implemented a 'bring something to take something' method, for a child to take something from the shed they were asked to see if they could find anything in the yard that no one was using and bring that to the shed first. I believe the experiment of having the shed open went really well and it was really positive for the children's engagement, other educators felt differently. We are going to revisit the idea at our team meeting once we have had a bit more time to reflect on the experience.

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It has been very challenging coming back to uni this year, uni is a whole family effort as I have two toddlers and a husband that does shift work. I am also working full time this year because of the cost of living crisis and I still want to do all the extra curricular activities I previously have done with my children.

I found the session disjointed, and I struggled to get my head around the larger group. I am a connection learner and passive in nature so I found it very hard to find my confidence to speak up, and I knew it would take time because it wasn't until I made a connection with the Gippsland group that I had started to speak up.

One thing I took from the session, is that I felt very connected to Victor Wooten's TED talk (Music as a Language: Victor Wooten at TEDxGabriolaIsland 2013).  I enjoyed Victors notion that music should not be explicitly taught but incorporate the same as language.

I think Victor's video further engrained my vision as a teacher, and helped solidify the type of teacher that I want to be. I think that ECT's don't have to be 'schoolified' and be told by Primary Teachers how we should run kinder to best suit them, but we should come with our knowledge and teach the primary teachers how to change their program to best suit the child. I believe that ECT's deserve a seat at the table when it comes to "school-readiness".

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Images generated from padlet.com

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Kilby J 2017, The Parallaxis: a game of walking between worlds <https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/The-Parallaxis-a-game-of-walking-between-worlds/9921863776001341#metrics>

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Music as a Language: Victor Wooten at TEDxGabriolaIsland 2013, online video, YouTube, viewed 8 March 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zvjW9arAZ0>.

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I was still feeling sluggish entering session 2, I feel as though my mind is really struggling to balance everything I am involved in and I feel that I am stretched very thin.

I still feel conflicted about the joint sessions,  I find that the class is too large and too easy for me to disassociate with the content.

I did not resinate with the Movement, Sound and Play TED talk, I found it long winded and didn't speak to the way I learn or connect with content (Artifact Dance Project: Movement, Sound, Play at TEDxTuscan 2018).

Not much resinated for me during this session.

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I felt very unwell this session, I had a lot of trouble focusing on the class and ended up leaving the session early. I revisited the course content but I still do not think a lot of this unit's material is connecting with me personally and its a real effort to get content done for my assessments.

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I was sick this session so I was unable to attend but I looked at the course work in my own time when I was feeling better.

Again this unit doesn't connect with me and I find that I have to force myself to sit in front of the computer to get through content. I believe that I am a very creative person so I'm not sure what the disconnect between the content and my interest is.

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I enjoyed Saturday's session because it was a smaller group of familiar faces and it was in person. I also liked that we were able to go and explore as a group and just get out of the classroom and into fresh air.

I felt that we didn't do too much course content, as we were focusing on assessment task 2.

I really enjoyed collaborating face-to-face though.

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I was in the city at a hotel for this session, and I found it easier to concentrate as I did not have my normal distractions that I would have had at home.

I enjoyed the discussion about imaginary friends, because as a child I had an imaginary friend called "little monster" and he lived in my cupboard.

I am still, however, feel that this content hasn't challenged me as an educator but confirmed my current understandings of early education.

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I did not attend this session as we had uni on Saturday, then I was in the city from Sunday night to Tuesday night and I hadn't spent any time with my children.

I looked through the content and enjoyed the exploration of different modes of story telling, one of my professional goals this year is to explore the art of story telling to assist with my practice.

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Overall this unit was a hit and a miss for me.

I feel that some of the content made me feel confident as a pre-service teacher and in my own personal philosophy but it didn't challenge me to delve deeper into the core of my practice like some other units have.

My biggest positive from the unit is that it has assisted my own personal research into the art of story telling.

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Artifact Dance Project: Movement, Sound, Play at TEDxTuscan 2018, online video, YouTube, viewed 22 February 2023, <https://youtu.be/HrgpeuPbp-I>

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Movement, Sound, Play | Artifact Dance Project | TEDxTucson