School Play Area

Observation Date: March 11, 2009
Observation Time: 1:45-2:45

Water Table Center

Time: 1:45 - 2:15
Who: Afternoon preschoolers
Where: SNC Children's Center
Ages: 4&5
Gender: 2 boys and 2 girls
Materials provided: water, bottoms of water bottles, toothpaste, toothbrushes

Play with the environment:
This group of preschoolers began by playing as they were shown. They flipped over the bottom of the bottles, grabbed a tooth brush and tooth paste and began to practice brushing teeth. After about 10 minutes of that, they started playing with the water. They would fill up cups and dump out the water like a water fall, get more tooth paste to make the water look soapy and put that in a bottle and cover it with another bottle and shake it all up. They were practicing pouring and mixing and even made some shakers out of the materials they had. They poured water back and forth between one another and even had boat races.

I have noticed that children always find creative things to do with the materials provided that is not what you had planned.

Block Area

Time: 2:15 - 2:45
Who: Afternoon preschoolers
Where: SNC Children's Center
Ages: 4&5
Gender: 3 boys
Materials provided: wooden blocks of all shapes and sizes

The boys began with the usual ideas of building a car, making tall structures and then after rolling the cylindrical blocks around they came up with the idea of bowling. They set up the skinnier cylindrical blocks like at a bowling alley, and moved to the other side of the block area to roll a larger one towards those blocks. Their goal was to knock them all down. They all took turns bowling and helping each other set up the pins. One of the boys even said lets him set up the pins so it goes faster. They experimented with arrangements of the blocks and even started stacking them and getting other blocks off the shelf.

I am always amazed how long the preschoolers can stay in the block area and come up with creative things to do. All they had was a variety of blocks and an open space and they could play for hours!