Although to the casual glance our Discovery Time appears to be fifty-minute playtime, in actuality many concepts are learned through those extremely valuable activities.
The most important skills that children learn through play are social. We promote peer interactions, relational problem solving, sharing, turn-taking, conversation, delayed gratification, and pro-social behaviors such as speaking and acting positively. Our four-to-one child/teacher ratio enables us to provide guidance, practice, and intervention to each child in these skills.
Many academic skills, such as math, literacy, science, technology, art, and muscle development, are also learned through our discovery centers. We create our centers based on our assessed needs of each child. If we find that a certain child needs more writing experience, rather than forcing that child to go to the writing center, we will bring writing into that child’s preferred center. Each center in our room has at one time or another been used to promote the acquisition of every academic skill. In this way, we can ensure that all children gain experience with all areas of the curriculum, regardless of which centers they choose to explore.
Each discovery center is created to promote specific skill enhancement. Our goal with our centers is to engage each young mind for an extended length of time. Consequently, we try to avoid sampling or flitting behaviors. We facilitate prolonged engagement by providing continuity in our centers. When everything in our room is new, we get a novelty response from all the children. They have to try everything in one 50-minute-long period of time. Although they do visit every center, they do not engage in any activity long enough to develop new skills or gain true understanding. By keeping some of our centers the same for an extended period of time, we can avoid the novelty response and thereby encourage knowledge an skill acquisition through prolonged engagement. A child’s play truly is a learning experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment