January 2024
We have just added the marble works to our room to use and explore. The interest was sparked by the children visiting the school age room and playing with them however through other observations we noticed some connection with the marble works, tubes, dramatic play and our story telling. Here is a quick snapshot of when we made these connections in our daily journal of Thursday January 18. We are still in the process of exploring how to expand and interconnect them further, which will be discussed on Friday during our team meeting, so stay tuned!
As the morning carried on, our marble works continued to be used as the children explored different ways to connect and move the marbles down them. A made a very creative “quick trick track” (his name for it) as he lined up the different pieces and was able to get the marble to move through the track and drop down into another track without connecting the pieces together.
Cars, ramps and buckets of snow in tires were reset up to expand on the play from yesterday. The children really enjoyed racing their cars down them as they each described what type of “superhero powers” they had.
“Mine is super fast powers see”- as A moved his car fast down the ramp and into the snow.
“Mine super fast too”- H
“Mine super smash”- L
“Mine flies!”- M
In the recycle centre Rachelle found a really neat clear tube and decided it would be an interesting and different way for the children to move their cars into the snow and sure enough it was. It sparked the conversation of how it helps make their cars fly. The tube was placed in the snow vertically and as the children took tunes with their cars as they dropped them down which lined up in a vertical direction. The display of the cars kind-of mimicked a flying-like display, which sparked their conversation.
“Look, they are really flying!”- A
“Ya they are flying, that so funny!”- H
“ Oh ya look they are floating in that tube”- A
As we reflected on this we connected an interest regarding tubes. We realized that they are more interested in tubes than we noticed because the children have also been using the marble tracks to create long tubes to look through, to explore different items to go down and to use in their dramatic play experiences. They have also incorporated tubes in the collaborative group stories we have been creating with them as they have been used to trap people or things in. We will continue to follow this interest and possibly add more tubes into our environment in different areas. At our next team meeting and we will be discussing our different observations and theories involving this.
Rachelle Minthorn RECE, Alesha Spirka RECE,
Wasantha Wanodani BEd SNE Post Grad Cert in Ed ECE ECD
