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Heartland TYKE Students Learn as They Play

by Dot Quiring

Heartland TYKE students are busy, busy, busy!  They are busy learning about living in town and living in the country. 

After making a comparison chart of the children in class who live in town versus in the country, the students have been making their own “houses” from cardboard. 

Para-educator, JoAnn Friesen, helps some of the students build their houses, while another para, Val Scheil, helps other students paint their houses.  The project extends from one day to the next so that the children learn how to build upon their ideas over time. 

They also learn to expand their concepts and language by interacting with their teachers and friends as they play, which is children’s “work”. After they make their houses, the children get to play with them.  Some children make roads between their houses and put little toy people in them as the families. 

Other students put block buildings around their houses to add to their play with cars.

As the children play, the teacher, Dot Quiring, takes digital camera pictures of them.  The children then dictate stories on the computer so that they have a “story” to take home to share with their parents.

These stories help to extend the children’s language.  By asking questions to prompt their verbal ideas, the teacher can work on important language forms, like verb tense, pronoun use, and descriptive words.

The stories can also be drawn with an “event-based” line-drawing.  This means that the picture shows an agent-action-object relationship.  In other words, it shows a person, doing an action (playing, driving) with an object (bus, house).

The children then draw their own stories about their play activity during “recall time”.  They draw the same kind of “event” picture, showing themselves in the picture, as well as the objects they played with.

They then dictate a story to the teacher that describes the idea of their picture in a sentence, not just a label of the items shown.  These recall stories are also taken home to share with parents.