The Wonderful Family Corner

The children at Mairtown Kindergarten really enjoy our family corner. It is a favourite space, always busy, full of role play, children reliving experiences and playing with their imaginations. It is an engaging place, where children delve into expressing themselves through their pretend play in both social and individual situations. The play that happens in this space is beautiful, rich and real.

I just thought I would give a little bit of history behind our family corner area. A few years back, after engaging in self-review around the family corner, the team at Mairtown Kindergarten decided to design a space to help enhance the type of play that happened in this space.

 

The team wanted to make this a more concrete and functional space, which was inviting and aesthetically pleasing.  It was dressed with some delightful wall paper, intriguing furniture was added and some solid wooden framing and a swinging door was constructed to give this space a real sense of ‘place’.

Over the years this has proven to be very successful project, creating many positive outcomes, supporting and fostering many of our attending children’s learning and development, especially through the amount of role play, dramatic play and imaginative play that has taken  place.

“Dramatic play engages children in both life and learning. Its’ real value lies in the fact that it increases their understanding of the world they live in, while it works to develop  personal skills that will help them meet with success throughout their lives.” (Cecchini, 2008)

The family corner and the way it is set up like a small house with cups and sauces, pots and pans, beds and tables is wonderful for creating many opportunities for extending on children’s interests in imaginary play. This type of play allows children to explore the magic of being creative with their ideas and knowledge in a safe but meaningful way. The roles that they chose to play with in this context are mostly realistic.

Davis (2011) acknowledges that, “Imaginative play is essentially when children are role playing and are acting out various experiences they may have had or something that is of some interest to them.  They are experimenting with decision making on how to behave and are also practising their social skills.  Children learn from experience: from what happens around them, from what they see, hear, smell, taste and touch. To absorb those experiences and make sense of the world, they need to be engaged in imaginary play.”

The family corner is popular with both girls and boys. Family situations like ‘Mum’s and Dad’s’ is one of the more regular role play scenarios that are played out. As we are well aware of though, families come in all shapes and sizes and it is really lovely when observing children in this play explaining the different ways that their families are made up. For example one group of children were deep in play and they realised they had lots of girls in the game. They started negotiating who was going to be the ‘Mum’ and after a bit of negotiating one of them piped up saying, “You know we can have lots of Mum’s our house and an aunty and a sister with all their babies. We can have a dad too, but don’t need one if we can’t find one!”

For young children, their family and home are the biggest parts of their world. The imitation of what happens there and in the world around them is the central focus of how they play. We often see our children acting out and exploring the lives of people they are influenced by through acting out their work, their feelings, and their words.

The family corner is a place where children like to quietly play by themselves, however it is also a place full of wonderful social interaction. The children invite each other into their play and soon there are many different roles being played out. The children are always so engaged in their play and take their roles very seriously. The dialogue shared amongst peers during this type of imaginary play is often like a running commentary of what was happening, for example, “I better feed my baby so it is happy and then I better give it a big cuddle. Waa waa waa. It's ok baby. Mummy is here. Is your baby good Willa? I think she needs a feed too, and a bed and then you should cuddle her till she is so happy.”

“Through role play children cultivate social and emotional intelligence. How we interact with others is key to our lifelong success and happiness. Knowing how to read social cues, recognize and regulate emotions, negotiate and take turns, and engage in a long-term activity that is mutually beneficial are no easy tasks. There is no substitute for creative and imaginative play when it comes to teaching and enhancing these abilities in children.” (www.brighthorizons.com)

 

The joy, magic and creativity that happens during this type of play is so wonderful to be a part of. The children involved are incredibly good at being free and thinking outside the box through their play. As a teacher I recognise the value of imaginary play and the important role it plays in terms of lifelong learning. It is great for helping develop strategies that support problem solving in real life situations.

“Dramatic play encourages children to put themselves in someone else's shoes. Such role-playing helps them to improve their ability to do this in real life. They learn important social skills, such as empathy. Dramatic play also encourages expressive language. Children are motivated to convey their wishes to others and speak from the perspective of their pretend roles.” (Yalow, 2014)

Role play and imaginary play is important work for our children and as their teachers it is so important that we foster this. We do this here at Mairtown Kindergarten by providing a beautiful, interesting space, full of resources that capture the imagination. I know that I will always continue to make sure that our children have the time and space to engage in this type of meaningful play at kindergarten.

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” (Albert Einstein)

Our library day supports literacy development

Recently at Mairtown we have re-established our children’s library.   This is where we have a system to put our collection of books on offer to our children.  Once a week, currently every Thursday, the children have the opportunity to look through a selection of our books and choose one to take home in a named book bag to read and share with their whānau.

The thing I love about working in a community based early childhood education is all the fantastic parental support we receive at Mairtown.  Our library day is made possible and is successful due to our amazing parent helpers who set up and organise the library.  We are very fortunate to have such wonderful support from our families who willingly volunteer their time to come in and share the role of librarian.

“The experiences a young child has now effects them for a lifetime.  Thus it is never too soon to introduce children to books.  Children need to have experiences with books each and every day, including time for being read to and time for reading or looking at books by themselves.”  (Angie Dorrell, 2007)

It’s lovely to be part of a teaching team who are all passionate about the benefits of sharing books and stories, and believe that exposure to books is important for all children and their future learning and education.

Te Whāriki states that children develop an expectation that words and books can amuse, delight, comfort, illuminate, inform, and excite.

Not only does our library day create exposure to books it is a great way to support our children with transitioning to school.  Upon entering primary school children will be expected to have a book bag to take home reading books.  Our library day creates a wonderful opportunity for our children to gain familiarity with book bags and taking books and returning them, as well as assisting with the transition from kindergarten to school.

Experts agree that the prevalence of books in the home fosters a desire to read in children.  The more books and other reading materials that are available, the more children will value reading. (Lynn Dean, 2007).

Library day is always an exciting time, where our children seem thrilled about being able to choose a book to take home and share with their whānau.  At Mairtown we treasure books and stories as it is such a great way to encourage an early interest and love of books, so important for future learning and literacy development.

Literacy learning does not ‘begin at school’; it begins at birth.  Caring families foster and applaud children’s early achievements and early childhood educators complement and enhance this important learning which underpins school and life success.  (Jenni Connor, 2011).

Here are some of our children’s thoughts about books and our library day:
Sadie:  “I like our library day.  I got a kittens and cat book.  I like cats and dogs so I got it.  Sometimes I have stories in bed when I go to bed early.  Sometimes my Mum and Dad make stories up’.

Pippa C:  “I like taking books home, my Mum reads to me at night time.  Sometimes my sister reads to me when Mum does the dishes.”

Danielia:  “We take a book home then we have to bring it back.  My Mumma and Dadda read to me, I’m going to take that book home.”

Maximus:  “I like book day, we only take our library books home not any of the other books.  We don’t take our library bus books home.”

Kaden:  “My Daddy always reads to me every night and my Mum reads to me in the daytime.”

Lali:  “My book was about a chocolate.  The sun found the chocolate it melted, then the ants found it.”

Milla:  “My book was about hide ‘n’ seek.  My Mummy read it to me.  I really really love books.”

“There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.” May Ellen Chase

Mā te wā

Susie

Where do stories live?

For the rest of this year I am undertaking some research at Mairtown with the help and support of the rest of the teaching team, our whānau and community and of course the children themselves. This story began last year, when I was fortunate enough to win an eFellowship through Core Education. Of course those that know me, will be aware that the arts and creativity within early childhood education have always been a deep interest of mine and through my research, I feel that the next step for me is to look at the arts in early childhood through a variety of materials (for instance drama, paint, clay, photography, song, dance) observe how children engage playfully with them, and note whether these interactions can lead to children creating stories. Ultimately this research will be focused on whether these playful interactions and story making can impact positively on a child’s oral language development, overall literacy learning and agency (When children have a sense of agency they have the ability to make their own decisions and to control their own lives. Having a sense of agency is an important part of a strong sense of identity).

Currently I am at the very beginning of this research and in this blog I just wanted to share a snippet of what has been happening to date. So to begin, back in term 1, we as a team began some work with the children regarding their stories. Many children enthusiastically begun to explore this idea, creating their own stories using the different materials available to them. However, as I observed the children working, I noticed that the stories created mainly took the form of books which led me to wonder how we could expand the children’s definition of what stories are, what stories can be, and where stories originate from. To broaden their understanding of what a story is, as well as what it means to be a storyteller, I began to investigate alongside the children, the question Where do stories live?

Our conversations together have been thoughtful and very enlightening. At times there has been a fair amount of disagreement, but that has been respectfully discussed and talked through. When we first looked at this question, the answers from all the children were very similar:

Stories live in books, stories live in the library.

Children need time to talk about storytelling and story making and they need good listeners too (Stevens, 2012)

Then several days later as we looked together at maps and how they are able to tell people information, I asked another question ‘Could a map be considered a story?’ At first this question was met with a resounding ‘No’! but after a fair bit of pondering, some children began to say yes - although at this point the consensus was still very much ‘No’. It wasn’t until a few days later, with lots more discussion, and the important creation of their own maps, that each child decided that actually - yes - maps could be a story. Once the children considered a map as a story it appeared to open and broaden their minds and thinking of what stories are and where they live.

Pippa C: Pictures are stories.

Sienna: Clay can tell a story, and photographs, and books. Sculptures are stories and maps.

Wolfgang: Stories aren’t just in books, they come from the Lego as the Lego is magic.

Sienna: Stories can be real and they don’t have to be real…they come from your brain.

As time has passed and the children have been invited to share their stories as they work with different materials, the question ‘Where do stories live’ is certainly being answered in a very different way, and more and more stories are being created with whatever materials the children have to hand.

Storytelling and story making is a truly social experience as children and familiar adults collaborate together (Stevens, 2012)

I would like to share some of these beautiful stories with you – stories that come from children as they play with resources or create drawings.

This is a beautiful heart map created by Sienna.

‘This is my fairy heart map and this is its story. There are fairies, fairy doors and fairy dust – the stars are the fairy dust. There are 5 fairies, they are very special fairies, they do harvesting. They harvest acorns and nuts. Each fairy door belongs to just one fairy. There isn’t just one fairy, there’s a whole family of fairies’.

And this story on dinosaurs comes from Matthew’s drawing:

This Stenonychosaurus, he has long tail for fighting and he has spikes as he is very strong and he spikes holes, his spikes can eat him. He black and white. Velociraptor, he ate other dinosaurs, he ate this triceratops. He is green. Pentaceratops, he ate paper, the head is for fighting, he fight other dinosaurs, he is yellow and brown. Stegosaurus – he ate dinosaur name. He spikes for fighting the Pentaceratops, but he can’t fight it as Pentaceratops is too big and strong.

Kalani played with collage as he told me his detailed story.

Once there was two rocks and then a big big big big a small small thingy came and then a rock came and there was a storm and there was snakes and two snakes and the snakes wriggled each other and the storm blowed them away. And then they were gone forever and then a dancing rubber band came and then it fell over and then there was a big big big big big explosion from a volcano and it blowed everything away. And then a alien came and it hided under a rock and a family of eyes came and they just wobbled along and went on the rocks so people don’t know where the eyes are. Then some more snakes came and there was another storm and they blew away (this is a pretty long story) then there was a big big big big earthquake and then a small rock rolled around all over the place and then it crashed into the big boulder. Then a big big big long long long long long snakehippopotamus came. It’s a pretty funny story! The end.

And finally this beautiful story by Aurelia was created as she worked with clay to make a giraffe.

This is Sparkles.

She is pink cause she’s going to a party.

There is going to be lots of lollies.

There’s going to be lots of people.

There is going to be lots of dogs and cats,

and the dogs are going to be teasing the cats.

And that’s the end.

So to answer our own question – Where do stories live? – at the moment we know that stories live in sculptures, in maps, in collage, in books, in drawings and paintings, in movies,  in puppets, in dreams, in songs and in Lego. We certainly haven’t finished with this question yet, and I can’t wait to discover where else we may find some hidden stories.

Stories have the power to bring a community together

(Harris MacKay, 2013).

Ngā mihi nui,

Christine