NYLL’s Teaching Strategies
Emergent Curriculum
Observing children’s interests becomes the basis for lesson planning, projects, and curriculum development.
Children discover; teachers enhance.
The child assumes the role of an explorer and becomes the director of personal learning. The teacher assumes the role of a co-learner, facilitator, and resource manager.
The teacher studies the child through observation; the child studies the learning environment through exploratory play.
The topics that emerge become thematic units that are used to develop academic skills and document learning benchmarks.
Flow Learning
“Flow” is a term coined by researcher and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a psychological condition where authentic learning can occur.
Extracted through these 4 stages:
Stage 1: Awaken Enthusiasm
Stage 2: Focus Attention
Stage 3: Offer Direct Experience
Stage 4: Share Inspiration
Inquiry-Based Learning
It’s about triggering curiosity through asking the students questions. Then students are allowed time to ponder and research an answer. Followed by helping students focus on how they learned in addition to what they learned.
Activating a student’s curiosity is a far more important and complex goal than information delivery or demonstrating recall.
Constructivism
Constructivism's central idea is that human learning is constructed -- learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning. This prior knowledge influences what new or modified knowledge an individual will construct from new learning experiences.
Knowledge is constructed, rather than passively absorbed.
Passive teaching treats the learner as ‘an empty vessel’ to be filled with knowledge, whereas constructivism states that learners construct meaning only through active engagement with the real world – e.g. experiments and problem solving.
Learning is an active process rather than a passive process.
Information may be passively received, but understanding is not a passive act. Understanding comes from making meaningful connections between prior knowledge, new knowledge, and the processes involved in learning.
Daily Reflection
Designated time everyday for children to reflect on things they have learned. Children 5+ will have daily opportunities for natural journaling/practicing writing.
Play-Based Learning
Play is meaningful because of the authenticity of those playing. Children learn to be reflective, build social skills, gains understanding of personal limits. They solve problems, make decisions, and learn to trust their intuition.
Play occurs on the child’s terms, guided but not dictated by an adult.
Some types of play examples: symbolic, dramatic, exploratory, socio-dramatic, creative, deep, imaginative, recapitulative, etc.
Basic Education Subjects
Forest School teachers weave basic education subjects of math, science, social studies, reading, writing, art, and music into the emergent curriculum of the students.
Classes with children 6 years and up will have 1.5 hours a day designated specifically towards math, reading, and writing.
Classes with children 2-5 years of age will not have this designated time; instead teachers use repetitive opportunities to express counting, the alphabet, colors, and emotions.