Supporting the Play

 

You know you are in the right job, when you finish up your day feeling energized!  Helping the school friends work on their plans, work together, develop language, solve problems, and feel satisfied with their work is the best thing ever.  Here are some of the plans that the school friends have worked on recently:

  

Blocks, blankets, and Littlest Pet Shop animals!  The children used lots of language about shapes, naming animals, sorting into pets into animal families,  explaining how to wrap up animals to make beds, and where to place what in the building.

Working Alone:  The school friends have all learned to respect the Alone Table as somewhere safe and fun to go to when they want a break from everyone else.  Here Friend "K" finds the correct shape buttons to complete the picture, counts the buttons, and finds the corresponding number.  She has risen to the challenge of finding and distinguishing pentagons, hexagons, and octagons to fill in the giraffe picture.

Recreating Real Life:  Friend "B" and Friend "S" have often worked together to go grocery shopping or make a doctor's office for babies and pet dogs.  They load up purses and bags with "food" or "medical supplies" to take the best care of their patients.  They demonstrate kindness and empathy as they bring aspects from their lives into the playroom.

 


Friend "K" traveled by plane to visit far-away family this summer.  This is the part of her life that she has recently brought to play.  She sets up the Little People homes far away from one another, loads her people onto the plane, includes a "driver for the airplane," and takes the family to visit.  Once the plane lands, they get a "new car" to drive while they are visiting.

 
























Playing Pretend:  Today, Friend "K" invited her school friends to dress up and go to the hair salon.  We each took turns wearing the styling cape and having our hair combed and styled.  We were FANCY.  ;)

Friend "B" did most of the work as the stylist.  She knows about doing hair!  ;)

Let's Go Camping!

Family trips are done and it's time for Harmony's House to resume the summer session!  Yes!  We are starting a new theme: Camping!  (Ms. Harmony is obviously very excited.  She has spent quite a bit of time changing out each area with new things.)

Ms. Harmony built this awesome "tent" in the Book Area, so school friends can grab a book about forest animals or insects, roll out a sleeping bag, and get reading!

We've got forest animals, awesome tree blocks, rocks, fabric squares, and more in the Block Area.  School friends typically love using the tree blocks to build forest homes or tree houses for the animals and people.

We've got soft forest animals, a ranger, and pet carriers in the House Area in case any animals need to go see the veterinarian.  The doctor's kits, notepads, and phones are still in the house area so any doctoring can continue to happen. 

When you go camping, there're going to be bugs!  Check out the bug world we've got in the Explore Table.  Bugs are hiding out all over in the sand, under logs, and in the plants!  Use those tweezers and carefully find and collect all those bugs!

Even the Toy and Puzzle Area has forest animals, trees, and Native Americans to make a small world forest, not to mention the Lincoln Logs to build cabins and a silly "Skunk in the Campground" game!

Now we just need the school friends!  Welcome back!  :D

A Place of Caring

This month an all-time favorite building material was added to the Toy and Puzzle Area: Magnetiles! These were combined with the loose parts from March (CareBears, rainbow cubes, fabric squares, and cotton balls) to create an elaborate plan with bears, beds, breakfasts, birthday parties, cookies, and more!  The beauty of open-ended magnetiles is that they can be used to build anything, helping to develop creativity, fine motor skills, spatial awareness, story telling, and concentration.

Some of our bears woke up with colds, and they had to go back to bed to rest.  Some of the bears gathered for magic cloud or rainbow food.  Using magnetiles, a kitchen with a sink an oven was built to wash and bake cookies.

Friend "B" enjoyed painting.  This is a regular plan for her.  She enjoys seeing the colors mix on the paper, and observe the brush strokes of different sized brushes.  She also worked to dress up TinkerBell at the updated Alone Table.

Finally, the girls moved to plans in the House Area.  Specifically, they took turns being parents and doctors.  Not only did they use medical tools to diagnose and treat the babies' illnesses, but they used a notepad and pencil to record notes and write prescriptions!  Friend "Z" is interested in letters and reading, so she sounded out words like "Sally" and "Cold" and recorded those words.

Too soon, Work Time was done.  Students and teacher were satisfied with the hard work that was done in cooperative play today, both in the Doctor's Office and in building the CareBears Bed 'n Breakfast.  Can't wait for next week!

School is in the House! (Harmony's House)

We had a great first week learning about ourselves and others!  Our Small Group work this week included reading Faces by Sue Clark and examining our facial features in the mirror.  We talked about the various colors we could see, feelings we could communicate, and parts of our faces.  Friend "Z" observed that she had to turn her face sideways to see her ears, because not all of our parts are on the front of our faces.

Then we were given a blank face, and markers, pasta, wiki-sticks, jewels, googly eyes, and feathers to make our faces with art.

Here is our class collection of portraits!  The children used the materials creatively, using wiki-sticks to make curly or poky hair, pasta or feathers to make mouths, jewels to make eyes, etc.  Some children chose to use googly eyes and sorted through the eyes to find two that matched.  Each child decided on only having two eyes in their artwork because that was what they noticed in the mirror.

 

It is important to make note of the child's words and efforts during their table time in order to document the learning that happened.  The amount of focus, fine motor skills, creativity, and language used during this activity was important and exciting!

During Work Time, the children worked on plans of their own choosing.  Friend K worked on balancing bears of multiple sizes.  She experimented with putting different sizes and different amounts of bears in the scale buckets to see which was heavier.

We also used CareBears, fabric and cotton balls to make bear beds, and worked many puzzles, lacing beads, and Gears in the Toy and Puzzle Area.

Then we moved onto plans in the House Area and Block Area.  Babies needed bathing, doctoring, and dressing!  Roads were built, tools were used, and Little People vans were loaded with passengers.

We finished up by chatting on telephones to report what our favorite part of the day was.  We read a book about how wonderful we are as individuals, not like anyone else!  Then we played a game where we heard various animal or environmental sounds, and practiced listening, and then saying what we heard.  Using our ears is an important part of being a good friend and participating in the classroom.

The "House Area" is more than a house...

Although this center is referred to as the "House Area," it is so much more than a place to play "house."  Simply, this is the area where most socio-dramatic play happens.  This means that sometimes the House Area can be a post office, a fire station, or even a grocery store.  Changes this month included reducing the kitchen set up to a smaller furniture piece, in order to add in a baby nursery.  With the monthly focus being on different jobs people have in our community, it was important for children to interact with ideas of being doctors or nurses, bakers or chefs, veterinarians, or child-care providers.

Read to them

It's true.  Reading to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers is one of the best ways to prepare them for learning to read in elementary school.  The young children learn that language has rhythm, alliteration, and rhyme.  Language conveys ideas and emotions.  Language tells stories and can be illustrated with pictures.  Language is symbolic (in our language, via a letter alphabet).

At Harmony's House, the Book Area is kept fresh with new literature.  This week, I added books about Valentine's Day and all kinds of community helpers from construction workers, to teachers, to firefighters and veterinarians.