REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL ST LEONARDS NEWSLETTER Principal’s Message
19th August 2022
By Mrs Simone Cooke
Dear Parents, Responding to children’s interests and setting up interesting and engaging activities that offer invitations to play is central to the Reggio Emilia environment which we adopt here at Reddam. One element which is used with the children focuses upon “Small World Play”. This consists of providing the children with miniature items which they can use to extend their imagination, re-enact stories and act out scenarios that allow them to make sense of the real world. For instance, if our children are learning about frog life cycles and we do not have access to real frogs, this may mean our teachers will set up sensory tables that contains foliage, moss, rocks and add in some bubble wrap that can be made into frogspawn, along with tiny artificial frogs. This allows our children to create their own scenes, sing along to “Five green and Speckled frogs” and research how a frog evolves from
egg (frogspawn) to larva
(tadpole) to adult (frog) this allows our children to learn about the process of metamorphosis in a tangible way with hands on learning, and helps them to gain greater understanding of the world in which we live. Small World play is particularly beneficial for building children’s language skills as the children build their expressive skills and narrate what they are creating during their play. This often involves explaining the choices that they are making, re telling well known stories and inventing new ones. This builds their vocabulary and allows them to practise using new words in context. This enables them to start rich conversations with peers, as they compare the scenes and stories which they are creating and will often recite phrases from stories as they relay dialogue between animals and characters and draw upon past stories they have heard. REDDAM EARLY LEARNING SCHOOL | ST LEONARDS NEWSLETTER
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