Happy Friday, October 04, 2013
I wanted to share this article from the Childcare Exchange that I recently received. To me, it just reiterates how important play is in all of our lives, and that when we give children opportunities for open-ended play, great things happen. Yesterday in Ms. Cindy’s room, an 11month old child was watching 2 little ones argue over a toy, using sign language she told them, “no more.” In one of our VPK rooms some of the children were lying on the playground, it looked as if they had fallen. When asked what they were doing, they responded, “playing Good Samaritan”. Children use play to figure out the world they live in. They act out and reenact the things they see us doing every day. In another one of our rooms today they made and baked bread. The children took turns, waited patiently, measured, poured, watch the bread rise, spread butter and finally…ate the bread. Given the opportunity to play and experiment children will naturally build on concepts they already understand to create more complex ideas and knowledge. Use simple daily experiences in your home and turn them into fun and educational play. Children can sort or fold laundry, learning about alike and different and halves and quarters. While grocery shopping they can group produce items as fruits or vegetables, and talk about which group has more or less. These are all very important math skills that they can acquire with little effort on your part.
Enjoy your weekend and don’t forget to include your children in some of the things you do. What you see as work, will be a fun play/learning experience for them.
Play and Learning
September 30, 2013 – The Exchange
The significance of a man is not in what he attains but in what he longs to attain.
-Kahlil Gibran
“Play is simply shorthand for our capacity for curiosity, imagination, and fantasy — our creative dispositions,” writes David Elkind in his article, “Preschool Academics: Learning What Comes Naturally,” in the new Exchange Essential: Advocating for Play. “What makes play unique,” Elkind continues, “is that it enables us to create new learning experiences. To illustrate, an infant who drops a rattle from the crib, is learning about gravity. He or she is also creating a game with the parent who is retrieving the rattle. In addition, the infant learns that different objects make different sounds when they are dropped. Certainly children can learn these lessons from watching an adult perform the same actions, but it is much more powerful when the infant creates these experiences through his or her own actions. Learning by doing is always much more effective than learning by watching.
“Perhaps the best example of how children learn from their self-created experiences is babbling. No one teaches the infant to babble, it comes entirely from the infant. In the process of vocalizing, the infant creates all of the sounds needed to speak any language on earth. As the infant listens to the language being spoken around him or her, the baby selects those vowels and consonants that are unique to the language of the parents. As toddlers, children often create their own grammars. So called ‘pivot’ grammars are a case in point. That is the child uses a single word as the pivot of many different shorthand sentences, ‘Baby up,’ ‘Baby drink,’ ‘Baby down,’ and so on. Language is a powerful example of the importance of children’s self-initiated play activities in their social learning.”
Thanks and blessings,
Patricia L. Moser, Director
Trinity Child Development Center
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