Our Fingers Can Pretend to be like Animals!
Pretend Play at the Wooden Play House
One of the most familiar places that we know of is our house. It is in our house that we learn how to observe and see how people and things work/operate. It is also in our houses that we get to rest and feel comfort after spending time out in society. Oftentimes, we act and behave differently when we are in the house. Hence, our teachers prepared a station with wooden toy furniture for us to show them how we go about in our house.
L, who is doing a great job in using the potty, opted to get the wooden potty toy and pretended that he was the small raccoon toy using it. In this case, L pretended to be a parent/ teacher by giving encouragement to the raccoon to use the potty if it needed to pee.
B chose dinosaurs and pretended that it “crashed” in the house to give those who are living inside of it a big surprise. He even showed that a zebra can be friends with a scary looking dinosaur by giving one another a piggyback ride.
Animals in Everyday Life
How can we involve animals in our daily lives? With our imagination and observances of what is going on around us, we are able to easily integrate and use animals as a representation of prominent figures in our lives to do role playing. Here’s what we did:
N moved his dinosaur around the room and said that it could bite anyone’s feet and toes! Perhaps it was N’s way of showing that it is best to keep our shoes on when in school. He also lined up the dinosaurs similar to how we line up to wash our hands.
S used a toy elephant to show us how moving and running fast inside the classroom produces a loud stomping sound, similar to the sound our feet makes when we run.
Having the box of animal toys out became a means for us to learn how to read and take in social cues such as taking turns and waiting. D, N, M, and A all had the opportunity to communicate with one another ideas they thought of on how they wanted to play with the toy animals. They let out sounds that resemble phrases such as “No, please!”, “Give me please!” and the like.
I, on the otherhand, was delighted to play the role of a gray wolf who dances around whenever an upbeat song is played.
Apart from pretending to be animals, several costumes were also brought out for us to wear to pretend to be a different character. I was delighted to get her hands on the yellow bow headband which she happily went around the room with.
Circle Time
We continued on our animal pretend play by singing & doing the motions to the songs “Baby Shark” and “Slipper Fish”. There was an emphasis on how to move our body parts to widen our scope of vocabulary.
Continuing on with using our bodies to pretend to be animals, we gave a special focus on how our fingers can be used to resemble animals. For a good ten minutes, our hands became butterflies, crabs, lions, and more!
Yesterday, we met a spider who pretended to be lots of different characters from the book “A Cheese and Tomato Spider” by Nick Sharratt. Using the same book, we were introduced to another character who also wore different headpieces like the spider… it was a gray haired granny! Gray haired granny pretended to be a strawberry flavored ice cream, a cheese and tomato pizza, and even a birthday cake! We all had a good laugh being surprised with the many antics that silly granny had in store for us.
Outdoor Play
For our Outdoor Play, we spent time together with friends from Petals and Flowers classes.
We hope everyone is having a wonderful Tuesday so far!
Love,
Buds Class Children