Weathers Lesson 11

Hi all, I had an interesting day today. I attended a one day course on play therapy - which is basically using toys to bring out hurts and issues that have traumatized children. Interestingly, I found some comparisons with what we do in Imagine That curricula. I quote from Ellen Galinsky and Judy David in The Preschool Years:

- Play fosters a positive self concept
- Play promotes language development
- Play stimulates thinking and problem solving
- Play enables children to understand the world
- Play is a forum for children to express and resolve their feelings
- Play enhances creativity
- Play develops social skills and social thinking

Guided pretend play is one of the elements in Imagine That curricula and children these days, living in a society that gives less and less opportunity for play as we put more emphasis on academic, need to have this freedom to just play! Birds fly, fish swim, and children play!

We are going to go skating today as the weather turns colder....it is time to put on our ice skates and skate on a pretend pond to the music of Skater's Waltz. This kind of pretend play allows children to practice separating objects from their real life uses, developing abstract thinking. How would a ice pond feel like? How do we move while we skate? How does our feet move when it is on a slippery surface?

After our slippery adventure on ice, we will have some down time where we relax and rock to a steady beat while we listen to another version of Jingle Bells. It's important for the children to be aware of the different versions of the same song and move in response to the cue of the music.

Time to exercise our voices and tongues after a relaxing time of rocking! The musical focus here is vocal development as we sing All the Day Long in various syllables ( ba, boo, la etc) to the mirror. In this activity the children are led to concentrate on a specific phoneme and to discover how it sounds and feels when spoken in isolation. Looking in the mirror helps support their understanding of the articulation of these sounds.

After this let's dance to the same song in a circle without mums and dads and see what creative ideas on movements we can come up with! I know these children will have plenty of of good ideas that I might not even thought of!

How would one dance to the jazzy version of Jingle Bells? Again, the children are made aware of the different versions of a same song...an education in different genres of music. Mums and dads, we are going jiving again this week so put on your dancing shoes! If time permits, we might just do a spot of skating with the children too!

Let's also see how we can sing, rock and dance to our Goodbye song!