"Make play and games important parts of the curriculum…Instead of getting rid of blocks and dress-up clothes, kindergarten teachers need to primarily focus on improving the quality of make-believe play…"
Excerpts from Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Approach
We Make Center Description Signs to Inform Parents
Literacy and Dramatic Play Center
Here children are using language and literacy skills to assume and practice roles of people in their world. Children are reading and writing for real purposes as they make grocery lists, read to teddy bears, and take orders for restaurant food.
They are developing important social-emotional skills: cooperating, communicating, observing, and playfully creating with others.
Children are engaged in interpersonal problem solving, expressing feelings and learning to get into and out of various social situations.
They are building vocabulary and making connections to new thematic studies, experiencing creative dramatics and developing important communication skills.
Our literacy play center becomes a veterinarian’s office, post office, space station, grocery store, cafe, costume store, and pizza shop.
McKinley Vet Clinic: Open For Business
Cathy Jordan’s philosophy is simple: The children have got to love coming to school and have reasons to read and write!
Young writers need real world reasons to write. English learners rehearse new language patterns through play-based learning.
Schools for the 21st Century: Play Builds the Foundation for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (S.T.E.M.)
Imagination is more important than knowledge...
- Albert Einstein
Block Building: Growing Future Engineers and Architects We are:
- Counting, measuring, building, balancing
- Developing social-emotional skills: We communicate and collaborate
- Using small muscle skills
- Developing eye-hand coordination
- Learning to think like an engineer:
- Ask and imagine
- Plan, predict, and create
- Read with a purpose
- Record: write and draw
- Sharing pride in our accomplishments
Frank Lloyd Wright attributes his early interest in architecture to the blocks his mother gave him.
Research shows later algebra gains for children who engaged in block play in early childhood.
Play is the highest form of research.
- Albert Einstein
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