We are a play-based school. Sometimes I have to remind myself how important play is. This book is a lovely reminder.
“Play-based learning is crucial in early childhood because it fosters cognitive, social, and emotional development through natural exploration and creativity. It enhances problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity, while also helping children develop essential social skills like communication, negotiation, and empathy through interaction and play. Emotionally, play helps children manage feelings, build self-confidence, and develop a positive attitude toward learning.” Go here to learn more: https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/summer2022/power-playful-learning
Our vocabulary word:
The children all understand how he is not being very nice and working well with others.
Notice the lizard changed colors. (A fun time to talk about what a chameleon is).
This is probably the most favorite page of the story. The kids think it is so funny. Notice the ants. This is also a time we can talk about the text. How do we know that he is loud? (See how big the text is.)
We all know, it is so much more fun to create together!
After the story, we made our own city!
Next door in Maker Space, they worked on building a city too!
On the Projector:
We read this book in my after school classes, and talked about the difference between cities and towns.
We then built our own little towns, with roads for a little car.
I also found this road map.
We had so much fun with these little cars. We took them out into the hallway and raced with them (they wind up by pushing them).
We took all of the city boxes from the library and put them with the buildings Maker Space built, to make one big city to play in. We will leave it in the space, so others from the school can play with it too.
We also took some time to just play on the playground. (Again, sometimes I have to remind myself that even playground play is important!).
Find more to go with this story here: