Monday, January 08, 2007

A snippet

At this moment, Agent 002 is sitting in a wading pool, pouring colored rice from an egg carton into a sour cream container. He claims to be "cooking muffins." Agent 004 sits in the next room playing with her "laptop," which plays a different song depending on which letter she presses. I could justify these activities as educational -- he is getting sensory input, role-playing, and developing fine motor skills, while she is working on language development, fine-motor skills, and imitating adult behavior. Or I could say that that they are little kids playing, and having a good time doing it.

I think that I prefer the second description.

In the time that I have spent writing this post, they moved on to playing with "shakey car," a race car that drives when it is shaken (see here). Then Agent 002 set the keyboard to "demo," and they both danced around the room. They then took turns singing Jingle Bells into the keyboard's microphone as the tune played -- preschool karaoke.

A hug request just came in - gotta go!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Agent Z and J both have the Shake and Go Cars.

I totally agree with your second assessment. I take a good round of unstructured play and vivid imagination over assessment goals and learning outcome being reached in an structedued play environment any day.

Or maybe that is what the lost art of playing is?

SW in Bloomington, IL