Sometimes random things that aren't really toys, make for great fun. A basket of "white circles" appeared on the shelf this week in the Toy and Puzzle Area. The "white circles" were cups, empty spools of varying sizes, and 10" cake rounds.
The children chose to use them like ice and snow to make penguin houses.
Here is a multi-level iceberg! Very clever!
Icy fortress anyone?
The open-ended nature of these random "white circles" led to an explosion of creativity in the classroom. Indeed, as so well expressed in the Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool, "Play builds knowledge by offering countless opportunities for sustained attention, problem solving, symbolic representation... memory development, and hypothesis testing" (Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, K., Michnick, R., Berk, L., Singer, D., 2008).
