Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Pretend play with small worlds: Pride Rock

The Lion king is still going on strong with Sophia. How a three year old child converts a story into something alive is a process involving much creativity and cognitive skills.

The 30 days of hands on play challenge yesterday was to act out a story. I saw that and smiled. We do it all the time, everyday and the story has been the same one for the past three weeks.

"You always want to play Simba Nala", i complained to Sophia.

"No mummy", said Anjali. "Sometimes, she plays Jasmine"

Pretend play, for my technically trained brain, seems too unstructured to be of real use. But I have read the literature and the opportunities it offers for the growth of structured left brain skills, so I try to facilitate it, although I should reckon that someone like Patti may be better than me at initializing it.

But Sophia's obsession with pride Rock has challenged me in a way in which I try to incorporate structure into her Simba Nala world. The Pride Rock small world set up resulted from this collaboration of the structured and the unstructured



Simba and Nala on Pride Rock, overlooking their animals of Pride lands



Anjali cut out the butterfly and I stuck them on a toothpick to give dimension and make it look as though they were flying

Soon we had an overload of butterflies and flowers and we made a butterfly tree



A close up of the pride rock, which is basically an arrangement of tissue paper rolls shaped with newspaper mache and painted brown by the girls, and the tree which we created during the 30 days of hands on play sticky art challenge

2 comments:

  1. How lovely!! My daughter shares the same love of all things Lion King!! I think we've got a new project ahead of us! Thank you for the idea :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very creative and fun. I hope you'll visit my blog: Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents.

    ReplyDelete

For your little notes and ideas