Throughout a lesson, many groups of children come to the Noticing Mat, which becomes their paper. They quickly perform tasks to understand how letters, words, sentences, numbers, sets and subsets work, and fit, on that "paper."
The Every Child’s Path program is intended to be your core program for at least thirty to forty minutes every day when English is the children’s first language. Those whose second language is English, learn to speak English as they respond to questions and tasks using complete sentences. In Ghana they prefer to start the day with Every Child’s Path, when it is cooler and the children are better able to concentrate.
The detailed script allows new and experienced teachers to rely on it as much or as little as they feel the need. Every Child’s Path gives children the confidence and strategies to problem solve, not only in Literacy and Math, but in all subject areas.
Teachers who have followed the program found that teaching all subjects became much easier and enjoyable because teachers and children shared a common understanding and language for the concepts taught. These teachers also concentrated on alphabet sounds more than letter names during this time. Read more Teacher Feedback.
The following strategies were used to develop each lesson in Every Child’s Path. I learned how effective they were when teaching Reading Recovery.
Lessons Include:
- Questioning to keep minds active while promoting critical and analytical thinking; it also draws the children’s attention to necessary information
- Noticing interesting features of things seen in the box: similarities, differences, details and using language to describe their noticing
- Using what the children know to help them understand what they don’t know about a new concept
- Linking a concept to other parts of the math and literacy programs, other subject areas and to the world
- Automaticity (speed) in demonstrating understanding of a concept
- Active Participation of mind and body by performing tasks on the Noticing Mat, or thinking of answers to questions
- Wide range of tasks and materials