Early Education Teaching Kit
Teaching & learning
through play
School should be fun – for both teachers and students. Keeping students engaged and entertained makes learning to seem like play. The Early Education Teaching Kit is a comprehensive tool for teaching the youngest learners.
The Kit includes cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development activities.
What does a typical lesson look like?
This teaching kit focuses on key development areas in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children. Most of the activities are suitable for both groups, the younger and older children. The ready-made activities are not one-time events but are designed to be repeated many times with the same group of children.
Sample activity: Spatial Orientation And Directions
In the Badge interface of the Photon EDU app, choosing the blue color will make the robot turn right while choosing the yellow color – left. You put blue and yellow bands on the robot’s ears to teach the children how to tell left from right. To help the children understand this concept, they put the same bands on their hands – blue on the right and yellow on the left. Then the children drive the robot from point A to point B, turning left/right to avoid obstacles on the way.
The colors allow them to tell left from right much more easily while observing the robots’ movements in the real world helps them grasp the concept of directions more quickly. They learn to predict what the robot will do when they choose the color assigned to the direction too. During this activity, the children imitate the robot’s moves to make fewer mistakes.
Sample activity: Naming emotions
Open the “Ready-made activities” section in the Photon EDU app and setup a program that randomly makes sounds of various emotions. Select only emotions depicted on the selected set of flashcards. One of the triggers used in the program could be, for example, stroking the robot’s head.
After preparing the play area, ask the children to sit on the floor around a set of the Emotions flashcards. Then, ask the children to approach the robot one by one and pat it on the head. In response, the Photon Robot should play a random sound representing one emotion. The child has to guess the emotion, find a flashcard depicting it and name it. This activity is a perfect introduction to exploring different emotions and explaining how to cope with them.
Each lesson scenario provides teachers with detailed instructions on how to conduct the activities. Depending on the activity, the students or the teacher control the robot’s actions.
Cognitive Development
Activities in the kit help the children to learn about colors, shapes, and letters. They will also learn about ecology, weather, and days of the week.
Emotional Development
The kit supports emotional development by naming and mimicking selected emotions, learning about empathy, and ways of coping with difficult emotions.
Social Development
The resources in the kit allow for learning about social norms, being polite, and behaving in difficult or stressful situations.
Physical Development
The exercises in this Kit support physical development through physical activities, dancing, and gross motor skills development, e.g., building obstacle courses for the robot, racing with the robot, and much more.
All lesson scenarios and teaching resources in the kit are fully adapted to the age and skills of children in terms of methodology and content.
The Robot Photon and the included 50 lesson scenarios make the central part of this kit. Moreover, teachers are equipped with the accessories necessary to conduct the activities, including two educational mats and flashcards. The lesson scenarios are organized by key areas of children’s development: cognitive, social, emotional, and physical. Educators receive detailed instructions on how to conduct these activities. There is also a comprehensive Quick Start Guide to walk you through the first steps of using the robot and describe in detail how to use the dedicated Photon EDU app and resources.
All a teacher needs in one box
- Photon Robot
- Educational mat (Alphabet, Numbers, Shapes)
- Educational mat (Plain grid)
- Set of 50 Lesson scenarios (activities)
- Set of 3 Worksheets
- Set of 52 Cards with various symbols
- Educational Cube
- Set of 300 name sticks / counting sticks
- Yellow and blue wristbands (2 x 26 pcs.)
- Flashcards (5 sets):
• Symbols Used in Our Application
• 2 x Characters, Weather, Emergency Vehicles
• 2 x Alphabet, Numbers, Shapes
Photon EDU – our dedicated app
The kit includes a dedicated Photon EDU app to facilitate the work of teachers. It allows teachers and children to control the robot and has several interfaces tailored to the age and skills of students.
The Photon EDU app main features:
• Access to ready-made programs that teachers can adapt to the group’s needs in a few simple steps; for example, the robot can divide students into groups or indicate a participant for your next exercise.
• Several programming interfaces allow you to work with older and younger preschoolers. You can also adapt the difficulty level of each exercise to the children’s abilities.
• Two account types – Educator and Student. Your account gives you access to all the app’s features, while the simplified Student’s account allows controlling the robot’s actions.
• Access to additional lesson scenarios and the Photon Robot Textbook.
Where to download the app?
Mobile devices
The Photon EDU app can be downloaded from the application store available on your devices, such as Google Play, App Store, Huawei AppGallery, or
Amazon Appstore.
Computers
The Photon EDU app is an integral part of the dedicated teachers’ app for computers, Photon Magic Bridge. You gain access to all the Photon learning tools by downloading it – everything is in one place on your computer. To download the Photon Magic Bridge program, click here.