Playful Learning... I chose the name "Playful Learning" for our class blog because there is so much authentic learning that happens while children are engaged in play. It is our job as educators to recognize and celebrate learning as it occurs and to find interesting ways to encourage their interests and support their learning needs. Here are just a few examples of some recent "PLAYFUL LEARNING"!!

Building an Ice Cream truck for dramatic play.  Building the truck helped students to develop problem-solving and co-operation.  Dramatic play helps to develop oral language skills, social skills, and it helps students to develop their story-telling skills.

"I made an ice-cream sundae."

"Come on over to get your ice-cream."

"I'm working in the ice-cream store."

"Chocolate ice-cream with candy sprinkles."  We used beads for the candy sprinkles.

The students enjoyed using scented playdough for the ice-cream store.  We had chocolate, vanilla and grape.

Our ice-cream store ran out of playdough pretty quickly.  Time to make a new batch!!!  We are learning to read recipes and measure ingredients.

Students used their "best guess" spelling to write out the recipe.

This is our word wall we created together.  Students can refer to the wall to learn about the formation of a letter, the sound a letter makes and to find out how to spell some simple words.

This student is matching the letter to the word wall and telling his friends the sound the letter makes.

We decided to make real ice-cream since students were so interested in this dramatic play centre.

Time to beat the cream, sugar and vanilla together.

After leaving it in the freezer for a couple of hours, we were excited to see that it was ready.

"Yummy!"

This student wanted to create a jungle in our sand table, but he said we didn't have enough animals and play grass.  I invited students to create a shopping list of items that they would like me to purchase for use in the sand table.

This provided an opportunity for authentic writing.  As always, I encouraged students to try to use best guess spelling.

Students requested: 1) dinosaurs 2) animals 3) play grass 4) cars 5) spaceships 6) toy people 7) trucks 8) marbles  They also asked for googly eyes and Christmas materials for the art centre.  Time for me to go shopping.

After reading the story of "The Gingerbread Man", students used materials in our classroom to retell the story.

"I will make you a gingerbread man."

"Run, run as fast as you can!  You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!"

We then used some gingerbread playdough that I made to create our own gingerbread men.

Playdough promotes creativity and storytelling, and it helps to develop the small muscles in fingers that are needed for writing.

Now that's playful learning!! :)