Dramatic Play

It is a proven fact that make belief play enhances many skills in children yet in today's early childhood classrooms we don't lay much stress on its importance. Play is often looked at something to be done at home rather than at school. It has changed over the years and there is no doubt that kids today seek more pleasure from video games or rather i pads than playing with peers. But old fashioned play is not just fun. It enhances skills like self regulation, control and language development. When children engage in pretend play they use a lot of private speech which is self regulating. Structured activities don't allow children to use such speech and hence don't give an opportunity to the kids to manage emotions or master social skills or solve problems.

Few things that one could do to set the stage for dramatic play and get the kids excited about it are:

Create an environment which invites kids to enact various roles. Set up an area in the class with various props but restrict giving children specific props to play. Allow multipurpose props that can be used to stand for many objects like boxes. They can turn into cars. trucks, refrigerators,rockets etc. Let children create their own props to make them feel more engaged.

Introduce and talk about various roles that people do in life. e.g. in a hospital, you would find doctors, nurses, receptionist, chemist, patients etc. When children are familiar with the various roles that people do in various settings, they would be more eager to enact such roles.

Allow children to plan their play. Of course the teacher will have to play an important role in this. She will have to discuss initially with children on the roles, theme and what will happen in the play. Initially one can divide children into groups to manage the dramatic play area and to ensure that even the shy ones get a turn. Plenty of time has to be given to children to fully explore the area and the materials.

With these few simple strategies you can give valuable and enriching experiences to children which would have a long lasting impact on our kids.

I must admit that i was also one of the teachers who wasn't particularly paying attention in building mature play skills in my children until a workshop i attended got me thinking. I had the occasional housekeeping center with the usual tools but i never paid much heed to it. But i was amazed at the response i got from my kids when i turned the little corner of our room into a doctors clinic. We were learning about doctors and i thought it was the perfect opportunity to introduce play in a meaningful way. Children were talking, discussing, taking turns, assigning roles to each other and mostly having a blast.I must say i have decided that this is one area i will not be turning my back on but would work consciously to bring it in my daily routine.

Here are few glimpses of that center in my class.

I made the signs and posters for the doctors clinic and you can get them by clicking HERE

The kids were super excited to work here and this picture captures that moment pretty well.

Under the Sea...continued

The big day came and went in a jiffy! It's ironical that all the hard work, effort, toil, planning, creating and execution doesn't really seem a big deal when the event gets over. Its leaves an empty feeling, not of dissatisfaction but something which i can't really explain. Probably because the event itself doesn't last too long but the process really does! But i don't carry any regrets for putting in the long hours because the entire journey of learning turned out to be full of excitement for the little ones. And the end result was really worth the while. 

I am sharing few pictures of activities that my kiddos did while learning about sea animals. I tried to integrate all aspects of learning and do activities which kids could connect with and see the purpose behind it.

I integrated literacy into the unit and we did interactive writing for all the animals that we learnt about.

 We made beach books in which children wrote what they would like to do on the beach.

We drew the picture of a sea animal that we would love to be.

 Since my children have started reading CVC words, they wrote words of their choice on submarines. The idea came from Deanna Jump.

 We read a lot of poems related to sea and made illustrations for our poetry journals.

The book "How deep is the sea?" was a wonderful read and the kids drew their favorite page from the story.

The dramatic play area was the most exciting place for kids.There was a submarine, a pirate's hat, sarongs, scuba diver equipment, shells, sand and much more for the kids to enjoy.

We played a lot of number and visual discrimination games at the 'theme' center.

Math was never so much fun! Graphs, number correspondence and pre-addition activities 

got integrated into the theme.

Inside the crab, i stuck a math fact and children tried solving it.

 We made the suckers of the Octopus according to the number on its arm.

Ocean Graph !

The kids did lots of craft activities after learning facts about the animals.

Sponge painted Sea Horse and glittery Starfish!.

 Paper Bag Fish!

 Beware of the Sharks! The template came from Deanna Jump.

And last but not the least i gave the kiddos some fine motor practice. They cut the tentacles of the Jelly Fish and sang the three Jelly Fish song. I found this cute idea HERE.

 I made a little fish gift for my sweet cupcakes. The pack had 'kisses' inside it. The template can be found HERE

Hope you enjoyed reading about these activities as much as i enjoyed doing them.