What is Play-Based Learning?
What is Play-Based Learning?
Play-based learning is an education style that emphasizes physical play, movement, exploration, and problem solving. Children are given time to play and work independently, which allows them to learn naturally and develop social and emotional skills.
Creative problem solving is a critical skill best learned in early childhood when brain growth and innate curiosity are at their peak.
In the primary years, children are beginning to think in complex ways about themselves, their environment, and others. Our collaborators play a crucial role in honing children’s brain development and learning.
By providing early learning experiences to students to lay the foundation for life-long thinking, Brightworks strives to transform the way children learn and the way they contribute to the world. Curious what this looks like in action? Here’s a peek into a week with our Kindergarteners. Their collaborator is the creative, Melissa Nocero and the Band (class) name is Garnet.
A week in the life of a kinder kid:
The Monster Arc has finally launched! We started our week off by reading Color Monster: A Story About Emotions. This group is so skilled at recognizing their emotions, sharing them with others, and understanding others' emotions might be different at the same moment.
Building off the book, we got crafty, making our own color monsters and showing off our end of day emotions with a shared Magna-tile art piece full of all the colors representing our emotions. We will continue to use "monster" to look at our emotions and dive into a lot of SEL work.
We are having so much fun exploring letters through so many mediums. Beyond the usual pencil and paper, last week we used shaving cream and this week it was Magnatiles. This activity provided opportunities to practice our letter recognition as well as geometric concepts such as rotation and reflection and work on sharing our materials. The letter U got some extra care from one of the Garnet Banders to make it look more smoothly curved and the rest of the band was ready with appreciations for the extra effort.
Banana slugs remain the star of the show during science with Rich and this week they began to take form out of clay. Working their little hands, the Garnet Band created their own clay banana slugs, making sure to include the anatomy that they have been studying. They are definitely looking forward to painting them this week.
Once again, we made it out to Battery Bluffs on Thursday afternoon. They ran, they played, and they made observations, also labelling their drawings. We noticed everything from the sandy beach to the dogs running along Crissy Field to the Golden Gate Bridge to the work trucks in the distance by Sports Basement. Seeing what really catches their eye is just another way that I am getting to know them even more.
We have been exploring the number ten as it holds so much importance in the mathematical world. We are currently working on making tens by seeing what two numbers we can combine to get to ten. We are using many tools to explore this concept including our fingers, paper and markers, and our favorites, Unifix cubes. By the way, counting with their fingers is an important part of building their math brains...research shows it.
Friday was an incredibly special day. In the morning, we got to enjoy 'reading buddies' for the first time with our Opal Band buddies. The Garnet Band selected books they wanted to read with their buddy and drew them a picture. The joy in the room was truly contagious and I honestly can't tell you which band seemed to enjoy it more. They are already begging for their next reading buddies time.
In the afternoon, the lower school enjoyed our Community Friday time out at the Tunnel Tops. We ate lunch up on the main lawn and then ventured down to the Outpost playground where all the kids from Garnet to Citrine explored the playground activities together. Walking back to school alongside the Citrine Band was definitely another highlight. These kids love their time with their older friends.
This week is going to be another fun one with our exploration of Monster and will include some monstrous sounds with the arrival of Fleet Week.