Developmental Play
Each week the kindergarten classes join forces to participate in developmental play.
The benefits of this carefully planned time are expansive. It is a learning time in an experiential format which offers diversity of skill building.
Opportunities to build, make, create, draw, paint, write and imagine take many forms such as water play, blocks, painting with varying techniques and media, board games, construction, patterning blocks and shapes, dice and card games, threading, reading, dressing up and puppets (to name a few things!)
Benefits of play:
Emotional: enjoyment, fun, love of life, relaxation, release of energy, tension reduction and self-expression.
Developmental: Cognitive- creativity, abstract thinking, imagination, problem solving, social empathy and mastering new concepts. Affective- self-confidence, self-esteem, anxiety reduction. Social- co-operation, sharing, conflict resolution, leadership skill development. Physical- gross and fine motor experiences, physical challenges and self-help skills. Attentional- attention regulation, concentration and persistence. Language- communication, vocabulary, story telling and emergent literacy.
Educational: providing a meaningful context for children to learn concepts, make learning fun and enjoyable, encouraging children to explore and discover together, encourage children to take risks and experiment, collaborative thinking opportunities, allowance of skills practice.
Term 3 play is just as much fun but we have learnt to be so much more cooperative and clever!
