Further details: The module presents an overview of language development, language theories and policies to support language and literacy in the early years classroom. Further focus is on bilingual learners and the influence of gender and socio-economic status. The final part introduces new literacies and the engagement with new media. All these parts should be influential on your teaching plan, the following will provide further guidance.
Child profile
Start with an introduction and brief profile of the child you are going to plan for – think about individual characteristics you need to consider in order to plan effectively. Make sure to present information in anonymised form, for example only use initials to refer to the child throughout. Provide some background information about the child, explain current development stage (language), and socio-demographic information (for example bilingual, EAL, current language proficiency, gender).
Overview
Introduce your learning and teaching plan. Describe how you arrived at this plan and what you want to achieve when working with the individual child. Provide some information about your timeframe. Explain how this relates to the learning and teaching of your whole group and highlight if and when engaging with this individual child differs from regular practice because of specific circumstances.
Objectives
Present a number of clear objectives or learning outcomes for the child (max. 4).
Activities
Detail a series of activities. This should describe a set of individual learning experiences, with a clear focus on the planned learning outcomes, demonstrating how you are planning to achieve these. Changes to the environment are also considered as a learning experience, but you need to show how the child would access the environment and highlight the benefits towards realising the learning outcomes. Consider potential difficulties which might arise and how you would react to these. Also mention required resources (materials, knowledge, skills, …) and reflect on the practicality of your plan. (This should be the most detailed part of your assessment, you should use about half the word count here)
Evaluation, assessment
Explain how you would evaluate the child’s progress and assess their understanding during and after the activities.
Reflection
Provide a brief summary and highlight how you plan to reflect on the effectiveness of your plan and implementation.
Every part (apart from the learning outcomes) needs to present clear links to theory (academic reading or theoretical models), evidenced by citations. Link to policy where appropriate. Some further points you might want to consider are below:
Consider what support is available to you from other agencies
If you are not directly working with the child, mention who you would instruct to work with your plan
When planning a specific approach, be critical (Do you think this will work? Why? What will you do if not?)
Make sure your plan is realistic – don’t describe an ideal world situation
This is a different format of assessment, within the overall word count there is no set limit for the individual parts, but the description of the activities should take up about 1000 words. (Make sure you connect these to readings and reference to show your ideas are evidence based.) Your objectives on the other hand can be as short as 4 sentences.
The remaining 4 parts can be of equal length, but can also differ, this is up to you to decide and will depend on your ideas.
