What is play-based learning anyway?
Welcome to the Small Characters Learning Center Blog! We are excited to share with you all things pertaining to children ages 3-12. These ages truly set the foundation for future learning and success in life as adults. If you are reading this blog, then you are on the same or a similar journey. Welcome aboard!
At Small Characters we believe in the power of play. But what does that really mean? It is a good question to ask! It simply means that we believe preschoolers, ages 3-5, learn best using the play-based educational approach. They learn through active, child initiated and led activities. The teachers and staff are there to help facilitate their learning by providing a developmentally appropriate and enriching classroom environment. Children learn to explore their environment and develop social, emotional, physical and cognitive skills. During these ages, children have a natural curiosity about the world around them. Play-based learning strives to use their natural curiosity by engaging them in meaningful and thoughtful ways which enables them to grow and develop at their own speed and level. It makes learning fun!
This series of blog posts will focus on the different areas of play in a preschool classroom. These areas are sometimes referred to as centers. In our program we have 8 centers in our room. The children have big blocks of their day scheduled as free centers or free choice time. During these times they are able to choose any center. We encourage them to stay in the centers (this helps them develop their attention span) by playing with them in the centers. We ask open-ended questions and play alongside them. On any given day, you may see a teacher reading to a small group of kids in the literacy center, facilitating the building of hot wheels tracks in the block area or rocking a baby doll while having a child bring them “dinner” in the dramatic play area. So please join us as we explore what each center looks like and what your child will learn while there!
One of our preschoolers used “The 3 Little Pigs” finger puppets to act out the story in the literacy center.
Literacy Center- What is in a literacy center and what are the children learning?
In our preschool, the literacy center is the first center you will see when you enter the room. It is what we call a “quiet center” because the children are quietly looking at books, having a book read to them by a teacher, listening to a story from the Tonies Box, using the felt board to act out stories or acting out a story with the finger or hand puppets. We also utilize technology by using a speaker that reads a book through Audible. The child looks at the book as it is read to them. In this center, preschoolers develop lots of print concepts like where the front of a book is located. They learn what an author does as well as what an illustrator does for a book. The children are exposed to both fiction and non-fiction books. They learn to recognize letters and later on they recognize words. They learn that sentences are made up of words and start to understand the basic pre-reading skills kids need when they go to elementary schools.
This is one of our bookshelves in the literacy center. These books are available to look at or have read to the children all through the day.
We make sure to rotate our books in the area so that they are relevant to the theme in the room for that week. A good example of this was our back-to-school theme for the first two weeks. We had a large variety of back to school books like “Twas the Night Before Preschool” for them to look and listen to on Audible. We use a Tonies Box and the figurine characters you can buy to keep the children engaged and eager to be in the area. The figurines sing songs with them, read stories to them and much more. They are engaging the child without the screen. Instead, the children can follow along as the book is read to them by the character in the book. For our “3 Little Pigs” theme week we used the figurines Elephant and Piggie as well as Peppa Pig. We also got out the Peppa Pig house and furnishings. This allowed the children to listen to the Peppa Pig character read books from the Peppa Pig series. This helps reinforce print concepts that children develop from 3-5 years old. This includes things like reading left to right, starting in the upper left-hand corner to lower right-hand corner of a page and letter recognition just to name a few.
Peppa Pig Tonies Box Figurine on the Tonies Box. It is a fun way for 3 to 5 year-olds to read.
One of the best and most engaging ways our literacy center reaches children and their families is through our lending library. Once a week, the children get a chance to “check out” a book from our lending library and take it home for the week. They pick the book they want to read which helps them have a type of ownership of it while it is in their home. We have a collection of backpacks which contain a stuffy and a book to read which they can check out if they want. The parents are asked to take a photo of the child reading their books and send it to us. Then we print the photo and display it in the hallway outside our classroom. It is a fun and interactive way for us to foster great family partnerships which extend the learning far beyond our classrooms. The following week the children bring back their book or their backpacks with the book and stuffy back to the center. Then the process begins again.
This is one of our backpacks for our lending library that includes a book and a stuffy for the book. Children check these out once a week.
If you are interested in learning more about Small Characters Learning Center for your child, please use the button below to schedule a tour. Then you will be able to see our play-based centers in action! Stay tuned for our next post about a different learning center where we will explore more about play-based learning.
