Angela Riggs, adapted from Under the Child Care Umbrella textbook Chapter 15
Thinking on your feet, utilizing your time well and integrating educational and enriching experiences are all necessary when caring for children. If you do these things well, it will set you above others. This is an attribute of a dedicated professional nanny and makes you more valuable as a teacher of children.
Use your environment and community resources to make special teachable moments for children. Research tells us that young children learn through experiences that impact their senses. Hands-on learning, relating events to existing experiences, knowledge and emotions, and the repetition of experiences aids in memory retention. Traveling with children opens up a world of discovery that can do all of these and more. However, you don’t have to go far to extend learning beyond the classroom. You can create these teachable moments in your backyard, transitioning from one point to another or while out on local outings.
Here are some key experiences in specific subject areas that you might include in your teachable moments:
Reading Readiness:
- Phonological awareness — Letter sounds and letter recognition
- Print awareness – signs in the environment, symbols, meaning, menus, and advertisements
- Language development – teaching new vocabulary words, new languages, expressive and receptive language skills, cultural or vocabulary specific for countries and regions
Math:
money, distance, size, proportion, computation, problem solving, spatial relationships, building, cooking, numbers, time, sequencing, ordering, comparing, and measuring
Science:
Compare and contrast, observations, experiments, physical science, life science, systems, models & diagrams, problem solving, weather, and environments
Cultural Diversity:
Food, religion, housing, holidays, events, festivals, ceremonies, life of the people, and languages
Social Studies:
Geology and land forms, geography, government, transportation, world events, history, and energy
Other Skill Areas:
Problem solving, decision making, practical living skills, and critical thinking
How should you initiate conversations and extend the learning?
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, you can maximize those teachable moments. Here are some specific tips for conversation starters to extend the learning and build key experiences:
Describe what you:
- see
- hear
- taste
- touch
- feel (emotions or beliefs) that this experience/place brings about…
Comparing/contrasting
- new experiences to what you know or see at home
- sizes, colors and shapes of objects
- how things work
Analyzing
- the surroundings — why the buildings are constructed with the materials of choice for this region
- why the plant life survives in this environment
- different abilities needed for animals to thrive in various habitats
Evaluating
- is this a great place to visit and why
- this activity or rate it on a 1 to 10 scale
- could this be a good place to recommend to a friend or younger sibling
- how would you change something here to make it better
Synthesis this new information by looking for patterns in the
- environment
- culture
- people
- modes of transportation
Organize
- the information gathered from outings into school projects and writing portfolio pieces
- use photographs from adventures beyond the home to build learning centers, file folder games, and scrape books that promote language development as well as help to build visuals that aid in retention of new knowledge to use later or on rainy days
- collect brochures and children’s books on the topics to explore further
Nanny resources are provided regularly via the INA Weekly Brief. We encourage you to subscribe on the left to receive this material weekly via email, and to share with your personal “Nanny Tribe.” Education is a key part of the INA’s mission to promote excellence in in-home childcare.
A special THANK YOU to INA member Angela Riggs, Early Childhood Education Associate Dean, Sullivan University, Louisville KY for sharing these resources with the INA.
Angela serves on the INA Board of Directors and chairs the Education Committee.