Skip to main content

Play, glorious, mad, mess!

Something I have learned through this journey is to embrace mess.  Our classroom and the environment around it can look like a tip at times, but the play going on within it is simply amazing.  Something that has come about quite naturally is that children respect each others items.  Not once have I had to remind them about respecting each others work.  

With the start of Number Agents this week came a lot of spin off play, totally led by them.  It was awesome to see.  

One of our invitations today was to create the farmers farm out of loose parts...they had a lot of fun.  Some stuck at it longer than others, and that is ok.  

A play-based environment is such a wonderful way to bring new children into the classroom as well, I don't ever remember visit days being so easy.

New friendships abound in our play-based classroom.  It is amazing to watch children's social skills and ability to empathise develop so quickly, just because they are allowed to (largely) negotiate their own play situations and problems.  What I have particularly noticed is the cross over between girls and boys.  More often than not children are engaged in play that is not just with boys, and not just with girls...as it so often used to be.

We always make the most of our outside environment, and the sun makes a huge difference!

I don't think I could honestly say that children have ever been happier in my class.  They are so settled, so keen, and could talk the hind leg off a dog!  The are all blossoming in confidence and that sly little smile and the twinkle in the eye that I see from my shyest class member is so rewarding.

The opportunity to just sit alongside them when needed, to play, to talk, to scaffold is very freeing, I don't ever feel like I have done my job so well!

Today we also linked in some writing with our 'farm' theme.   I use the word writing in the loosest term of the word.  Basically we write from our drawings by sounding out and labelling.  These will later turn into sentences as they continue to develop.




The loose parts farm :)




This is our school discovery shed being used by two classes today (junior./senior) such fabulous interactions.




Inside the shed :)



Glorious mess!


Creative :)





Making ramps :)


Imaginative play...



Comments

  1. Anonymous16 March 2017 at 01:34

    I see my daughter in these posts engaged and happy in her learning. The conversation after her school visit was full of excitement and keen to share with everyone we encountered that afternoon. Fabulous!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous21 March 2017 at 00:47

    The photos are so great. Allow the learning to be seen. Thank you once again. Love how you pull the learning out of the play.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ThinkSRSD - my journey so far with my Year 1 and 2 class

A reflection of my journey   - slideshow shows my progress this term as detailed in this blog post. Introduction to SRSD If you have been following any of my posts, you will know that my journey into evidence-based practice in all areas led me to SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) last year. I started to explore what I could find online and quickly realised that, even though I was only scratching the surface of what SRSD is, the impacts on my class's writing were obvious. I listened to numerous podcasts and read as much as I could find, discovering that SRSD truly fits the bill for an evidence-based approach to writing. I must preface this by saying that I am not an expert; my qualifications lie in my commitment to using best practices and making this work in a typical New Zealand classroom. Professional Learning Development (PLD) with ThinkSRSD As a staff, we collectively decided to undertake Professional Learning Development (PLD) in ThinkSRSD. Our goal is to develop a sh...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally Linking Reading and Writing

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally linking Reading and Writing Why a Basic Organiser Struck a Chord Recently, I shared a very basic organiser for reading comprehension on my Facebook page—something I have used frequently in my classroom. I was genuinely surprised by how popular the post became. It’s clear there’s a real hunger among teachers for practical ways to foster writing independence in young learners. With that in mind, I wanted to share the reasoning behind this organiser and how it fits into the wider journey of developing independent writers. Laying the Foundations: Sentence-Level Understanding My class of six- and seven-year-olds are building solid foundations as writers. We’ve invested a lot of time working at the sentence level, using Colourful Semantics to help children understand how sentences are constructed. From there, we began to add greater detail using planners inspired by Colourful Semantics, linking this with th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Puppets in my play-based class....why they work so well

I have been using puppets in my classroom for years now.  It wasn't until I started using puppets with Number Agency that I actually started to stop and think about why they work so well.  When children see the puppet villain their eyes light up, they are excited, engaged and interact very authentically with this imagined character.  In fact if you hand one of the agents the puppet they can easily take on the character.  I will often see quite shy children come alive with a puppet on their hand, or when they are talking to a puppet. Because of this high level of engagement I started to use puppets last year more widely to explore emotions and friendships.  The results were amazing, children seemed to relate beautifully to the puppet and in a way the puppet could convey the message so much better than I could.  When the puppets started to create short videos for the children to watch the learning really came alive. The Empathy family was able to guide us...
Post a Comment
Read more