This grant would provide our Kindergarten and K/1 team the ability to provide our students with dramatic play tools. These tools include; a sink, refrigerator, stove, hutch cabinet, stainless steel cookware, doll house set-up and multi-ethnic baby dolls. In addition, this grant will provide our team with culturally sensitive loose parts: glass beads, mirrors, jars, cups, stones, boxes baskets, fabric, etc.
“Play is one of the most important parts of childhood. It is through play that children gain information about the world and increase their cultural awareness. When children play, they engage in complex sequences of symbolic representation and figure out how social rules work. Children also learn to negotiate and understand each other.” -Miriam Beloglovsky
Pretend play is characterized by children’s exploration and interpretation of the world in terms of symbols and images, fantasy, make believe, expression of emotions, and their capacity to understand different situations in an imaginary context. Dramatic and pretend play cross cultural boundaries by allowing children to learn to respect and be responsive to children who are different from them.
Overall, pretend play builds essential core development areas; social and emotional, language skills, thinking skills and nurtures children’s imagination.
Through imaginative play children’s language, social skills and social competence expand. In addition, children can learn about equity by practicing collaboration and conflict resolution. Providing our youngest scholars with rich creative & dramatic play tools will, in turn, lead to greater academic and emotional success for all of our students. Student’s academic success is measured through ESGI, teacher observations and individual behavior goals.
The Kindergarten KBE daily schedule provides a 60 minute block for students to engage in uninterrupted pretend and symbolic play. The kitchen set would support us in re-creating a space that is common in all of our children’s daily living experiences. Then, we will promote and support children’s play through meaningful social interactions by providing loose authentic parts reflective of them. We will also support students when necessary with sentence starters and language modeling.
Yes, the loose materials purchased can be exchanged and rotated.
Cultural Misc. Loose Parts (4x 250); we did select a vendor for this amount because in order to find authentic tools representative of our students we must step away from traditional education vendors. The teams feels that we may be able to purchase a plethora of authentic Tahoe living tools at our local stores.
There are no additional funding resources that would cover the cost of these materials.
We have written this grant surrounding our TTUSD First 5 Early Educator Conference. At this conference, we had the amazing opportunity to access the text Loose Parts 3 Inspiring Culturally Sustainable Environments. This knowledge has provided our team with a new lens to view dramatic play and the academic and social opportunities it provides our scholars.