How Classroom Labs Can Nurture Foundational Literacy in Early Education

1. Laying the Foundation: Stellar Model

Children’s “foundational literacy” is an interdisciplinary competence for kindergarten to primary grades, focusing on learning how to learn and innovative practice. It comprises three interrelated dimensions: physical‑mental health, learning quality, and learning ability.

Physical‑mental health refers to cognitive‑neural development, motor skills, and socio‑emotional growth. Learning quality denotes students’ proactive and self‑regulatory non‑cognitive traits, rooted in self‑awareness and regulation. Learning ability involves problem‑solving, critical thinking, creativity, and other 21st‑century skills applied in authentic contexts. These three aspects are visualized in the “stellar model” of foundational literacy.

2. Learning‑Centered Classroom: Flexible Mind Habits

The learning‑centered lab embeds three core abilities and two key qualities as mental habits in everyday lessons, fostering students’ capacity to learn how to learn and maintain an optimistic, proactive mindset. It emphasizes authentic, challenge‑driven tasks that stimulate listening, genuine curiosity, and deep social interaction among learners.

Key questions include: What is the essence of classroom learning? How can we identify critical concepts and abilities across subjects? How can we prompt students to pose high‑quality, authentic questions? How can classroom structures nurture diverse thinking, creative expression, and effective learning strategies?

3. Gamified Learning: Aligning with Children’s Nature

Gamified learning integrates game elements, design, and spirit into classroom activities to activate learning qualities. By creating virtual or real game scenarios, rules, and tools, it leverages children’s natural playfulness to spark interest, imagination, and creativity, while developing problem‑solving strategies and collaborative skills.

Core inquiries focus on designing game contexts that stimulate curiosity, intrinsic motivation, sustained attention, and social interaction, as well as linking game mechanics to core disciplinary concepts and abilities.

4. Project‑Based Learning: Integrating Disciplines

Project‑based learning centers on core concepts and themes, using driving questions to guide autonomous or collaborative projects. It targets authentic problem‑solving and innovation across subjects, encouraging students to pose questions, build models, explore, design, produce, debate, and cooperate, thereby cultivating transferable problem‑solving abilities and learning qualities.

Key considerations include designing inquiry‑based activities that address real‑world problems, fostering interdisciplinary understanding, and promoting collaborative discourse and creative outcomes.

5. The “One‑Body Two‑Wings” Classroom Transformation

The three labs—learning‑centered, gamified, and project‑based—form a unified “one‑body, two‑wings” framework that embeds foundational literacy into everyday teaching. They align challenge‑driven problems, game scenarios, and project tasks with key concepts and abilities, creating a cohesive knowledge‑skill and literacy development pathway.

Gamified learning matches children’s play nature and supports the transition from kindergarten to primary education, while project‑based learning offers realistic, interdisciplinary experiences that deepen conceptual understanding and foster creativity.