Small world play allows children to act out scenarios (scenes from real life, stories they have heard and/or from their imagination) in a miniature play scene, created with small figures and objects.
A child’s small world play is often based around a certain theme depending on the child’s interests such as farming, construction area, dolls, fairy garden or even a dinosaur world.
Everyday items around the house or garden can be transformed to create small world play scenes. An empty box transforms into a garage for farming and construction toys, a carpet turns into a busy highway.
The options are as limitless as kids’ imaginations! During our leprechaun week, we learned all about Ireland, rainbows, and hidden treasure. With a variety of different sensory materials, students explored this new world with their friends!
Rote counting is just reciting the numeral names in order, “One, two, three, four, five…” But counting with one-to-one involves actually touching each object and saying the numeral name aloud, which is a much more complex skill for young children.
Activities that involve real objects that children can hold in their hands and manipulate are going to be the most effective for teaching the concept of one-to-one correspondence. One of these activities involved counting with unicorn “horns”. Using pipe cleaners as the “horn”, students slid beads while counting.
Each “horn” had a number ranging from one to ten. They were directed to slide the number of beads that matched their number. It was so exciting to see how sparkly our “horns” became!
The most important benefit of playdough is the word “play”.
When teachers introduce playdough, they usually do not have an ultimate agenda or ending outcome – the children are simply given the opportunity to play.
As part of our fairy week, we used play dough to create “gardens”, complete with glitter, flowers, and jewels!
Because this was open-ended play, students were given the opportunity to manipulate the materials however they so chose.
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