The United Kingdom has set consistent learning goals for educating all of the nation’s children up to the age of four.
Quantified goals are set for children from the nursery up through four key developmental stages.
The National Curriculum is designed to achieve these learning goals and provides considerable assistance to teachers and other educational professionals so that a high national standard of education can be maintained.
The Curriculum’s core goals are fostering knowledge development, understanding of the world, and communication skills. For children in this age group, dinosaurs make an ideal learning subject to engage with students.
The curriculum benefits from an ample amount of information, activities, and projects available on the topic.
Tying Dinosaurs To The Early Learning Goals
The statutory framework of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) includes important Early Learning Goals for children between three and five years of age.
The aim is to equip these children with the basic skills necessary to transition from the nursery to the reception/foundation stage of Primary schooling.
While some children are expected to significantly exceed the standards set forth by the goals, others may be working toward the standard at their own pace as they age out of the EYFS.
The EYFS is the UK equivalent of Australia’s EYLF in which educators such as https://curriculumkids.com.au/eylf-outcomes/ adhere to. These criteria are designed to offer every young learner a positive and constructive framework for developing learning skills and progressing into the more formal stages of the educational system.
Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals can be used to great effect in pursuit of the learning goals. Teachers can use their own initiative to develop extension activities and curriculum supplements that engage with children’s curiosity and allow them to learn through creative play.
The primary learning goals for the early years and foundation stage fall into six sections:
* Personal, Emotional, and Social Development
* Physical Development
* Reasoning, Numeracy, and Problem Solving
* Creative Development
* Understanding of the World
* Communication, Literacy and Language
Dinosaurs can be employed in a host of different educational processes aiming to achieve these goals. Real fossils, for instance, make excellent models for stimulating understanding of the world.
Learning about living and extinct animals and the way they relate to each other – identifying both differences and similarities – show students the connections between what they learn and the world around them.
The majority of children already have at least a passing familiarity with dinosaurs thanks to their frequent appearances in films, television, and books.
Dinosaurs also have constantly-refreshed media exposure, with new species discoveries making the news at roughly four-week intervals.
When we send members of our qualified teaching staff to visit nurseries and classrooms, we employ formal lesson plans to construct educational programmes that respect and pursue the key learning objectives.
This sort of outreach does a wonderful job of opening up extension topics and other elective opportunities for children to further refine their learning skills.
Because these sessions are most productive when the entire class remains strongly engaged and there is a sharp upper limit to the attention spans of children at this age, we limit our teaching sessions to roughly 45 minutes.
We try to use a broad-based approach that engages with as many different learning styles as possible.
A palaeontologist or properly-trained teacher will strive to engage with every member of the class when teaching this sort of lesson.
Multiple materials are employed to attend to the key learning objectives.
Children get a hands-on lesson in distinguishing between objects when they have the opportunity to handle cast fossils, real fossils, and dinosaur models. Identifying the attributes of such objects (light, heavy, warm, cold, soft, hard, etc.) gives children useful experience.
Keeping these sessions short enables teachers to maximise their engagement with children, but the same themes introduced here can lead organically into a host of different extension activities. Examples include storytelling, painting and drawing, drama, model making, and more.