How can our environment provoke different styles of play? This is the question Quartz Room educators have been asking themselves the past few days. Recently we moved our kitchen area to allow for better large body play on our carpet. This subtle switch not only created the space for the large body play but also re-sparked an interest in the kitchen area that hadn’t been observed in a while. Instead of seeing the children take the food to other centres to play, we observed the children staying in the centre and cooking supper. The children brought over chairs to sit at the table with while another children cooked at the the stove. We heard the children talk about what they were making dinner. Jacob was frying his egg and Elliot was making waffles. Ava made the announcement “Supper is ready” and Jamie pulled up a third chair to the table. These observations of play in the kitchen space brought on the discussion of how can we provoke different styles of play though out the room.
The educators decided that it was time for a change in our room. The largest change we will be experimenting with is having one table open for snack with a second smaller table available for overflow. By scaling down snack we are allowing more space available to the children for play. We also switched up the placement of the majority of the centres within the room to see if we can observe more of the innovative play we had observed in the kitchen. Last week in Quartz we had to say good bye to Bekah. Thank you, Bekah for being so open and honest with us about your ever-expanding tummy. It was so interesting to hear what was happening and especially helpful to those children in our classroom who will soon be big brothers and sisters. We are sad to see you leave, but are excited for the arrival of your new baby. The departure of Bekah brought us the arrival of Kaitlin. Kaitlin has worked in child care for 3 years and has her Early Childhood Diploma from Grant MacEwan. We are very excited to have the kind and playful Kaitlin join the Quartz Room team.
