Any teacher worth their salt will tell you that modelling is one of the key strategies for helping children learn. We know that the little darlings are lying in wait at all times, watching and listening and silently building up their understanding of how to ‘be’ in this complex world. They see us doing it, ahem, ‘right’ and use their imitative skills to do it right themselves.
As a deliberate teaching strategy modelling in extremely effective - it’s supportive, encourages children to use their initiative in a safe environment and enables them to understand what we are expecting of them. But outside of ‘structured learning’ evidence of modelled behaviour can be most entertaining.
We all smile when we see toddlers hoovering the grass, making themselves a breakfast of plastic bread and broccoli or paying for their groceries in the shop (where they inevitably either manage to buy an obscene amount of food for about thirteen pence or spend half their life savings on a tomato) but the real hilarity comes in their speech…
There is nothing guaranteed to put a smile on an adult
’s face like being spoken to by a three year old CEO or a demanding five year old mother hen. And there must have been something in the water in my nursery today as they were all at it.
Three year old Natalia was having a very busy morning painting the sea and must have spent the best part of an hour slopping all shades of blue over the massive strip of bubble wrap, but it seemed that she wasn’t quite as prepared to paint the whole Atlantic as I thought. I was helping some other children with their counting when I caught sight of a dangerously overloaded paintbrush out of the corner of my eye. I turned to tell Natalia to keep her paint at the painting table but she got in there first. ‘Umm’ she began pointedly, ‘I want a little help here.’ The tone of her voice indicated that she was not to be argued with, and her demand certainly wasn’t optional. She thrust the blue brush into my hand, rolled her eyes and went back to the task in hand, eyeballing me to make sure I followed. Which, of course, I dutifully did.
Then there was Amira, who was desperate to dress Eric up in a witch’s dress which, rather understandably, he wasn’t too keen to do. She followed him round the Nursery for a fair amount of time trying to get him to take the dress before she got fed up and came over to me, her face set in her best ‘I am not amused’ expression. Throwing the dress onto my lap she tutted. ‘Right, is Eric going to wear this or not?’ Then she folded her arms and glared at me. ‘Well,’ I tentatively began, ‘I’m not sure he wants to wear the witch’s dress Amira. Why don’t you ask Issy?’ Amira seemed to ponder this over for a few minutes before relenting. She picked the dress up and headed off towards Issy, shaking her head and muttering ‘boys!’ under her breath.
But my favourite one today had to be refereeing the disagreement between Cathy and Khadijah over who was the biggest scaredy cat. The ‘you are a scaredy cat’, ’no I’m not you are a scaredy cat’ went back and forth a number of times until Cathy got bored. She prepared to move on to help the TA cut the oranges, but not without a final toss of the head and ‘harumph’ followed by a disparaging look at her friend. ‘You are such a scaredy cat if ever I saw one!’ she declared, before marching off and leaving me, as usual, to pick up the pieces.
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