Kei Tua o te Pae
Kei Tua o te Pae/Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars is a best-practice guide that will help teachers continue to improve the quality of their teaching.
The exemplars are a series of books that will help teachers to understand and strengthen children's learning. It also shows how children, parents and whānau can contribute to this assessment and ongoing learning.
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A lens focused on assessment practices – He āta titiro ki ngā mahi aromatawai
Assessment that notices, recognises, and responds to mathematics learning in the wider sense will ensure that the mathematics in measuring, locating in space and time, designing (form, shape, and pattern), playing, and explaining are also on the curriculum agenda. Frequently the mathematics in an exemplar was not part of the teacher’s analysis of the learning and has been added to the annotation for this exemplar book. The “mathematics” may not always be the focus in an analysis of the learning; sometimes other aspects of Te Whāriki may be recognised as important at a particular time in a child’s educational journey.
However, highlighting the mathematics in documentation is an aspect of effective mathematics teaching. It encourages teachers and children and families revisiting children’s portfolios to recognise and develop children’s mathematical competence and continuity. Assessments can illustrate the view in Te Whāriki that mathematics is about symbol systems and tools for making and representing meaning and for solving and posing problems. Te Whāriki includes the learning outcome that “Children develop the expectation that numbers can amuse, delight, illuminate, inform, and excite”.11 Play is one way in which children will realise this expectation, and teachers will contribute to this expectation in a range of ways. A key finding from a New Zealand research project on mathematics teaching and learning in early childhood settings indicated that pedagogical documentation enhances the teaching and learning of mathematics in early childhood.12