Guess what we found in the Big Shed:

The New Zealand early childhood education curriculum states that children should be able to develop “the ability to represent their discoveries using creative and expressive media and the technology associated with them” (Ministry of Education, 1996, p.78). Technology does not necessarily mean that it has to be computer or something that runs on electricity, technology could be anything.


According to Smorti (1999) “technology o about helping people and solving problems” (p.5). After I had found this definition, I decided to get the four year old groups theory on technology.

N: “ummm a radio”.

P: “a computer”.

D: “you told us it was the blender that we used for baking”.

C: “I don’t know”

C: “books”.


After this brainstorming session, I suggested to the children, maybe we could walk around the centre and see what things could be technology, we found all sorts of things for example pen, computer, hammer, blender, stove, radio etc.

BUT…

In the big scary shed outside, we found some big ear phones, and old cassette tapes.

So we took the whole box of ear phones and tapes out for the children to look at and explore some theories about what these strange things could be. Some children knew what it was and some were unsure of what this strange thing could be. That is when D said “we have those at home, my mummy has those things”.

“Technology is also a creative and purposeful activity aimed at meeting needs and opportunities through the development of products, systems or environments” (Smorti, 1999, p.5). I decided to ask the children what we could do with our new retrieved treasure, one of the suggestion was that we could use it on the computer just like D has seen at home but these were old ear phones that needed different type of cables to fit in the computer so that was a failed mission for us but we did not lose hope.

One other suggestion was made by another educator that we could set up a call centre area, when I discussed this with the children; they were thrilled with the idea because we found out that C’s mother works at a call centre. This was a good opportunity for us as educators to have C’s mother talk about her job at mat time and this also made C feel very proud of his mum.

I would like to continue exploring theories around technology, I was able to see the difference between my knowledge of technology before and after I did some reading. I was able to work alongside children to extend on my own knowledge and at the same time got an opportunity to extend on the children’s knowledge through different learning experiences.