imaginations soar as they practice life skills, build vocabulary, recreate experiences, and express both positive and negative emotions. 

Through dramatic play children build social skills as they brainstorm with peers, listen to and incorporate another’s point of view, experience being a leader as well as a follower, and solve minor conflicts.  They gain a sense of importance as they grasp how it feels to be a parent, teacher, store owner or “boss”.  They experience a sense of success because there is no right or wrong way of pretending.

The block room is where the children have snack time and have the opportunity to build with blocks and play with a variety of vehicles in different sizes.  The children have adjusted well to the routine of hand-washing, setting their place with cup and napkin, saying prayer before snack, and are mastering the skill of pouring their own juice and cleaning up their space when they have finished.  The block area is always busy with little architects discovering concepts about shape and balance as they experiment with block building and expand their play with vehicles.  This is a great place for making new friends and learning to work cooperatively.

The creativity room offers three general activities:  the sensory table, playdough, and two large easels.  This room is very popular and is always bustling with activity!  The sensory table provides an opportunity to both explore the properties of and experience the feel of different textures as the children place their hands into different mixtures.  They are also able to measure, scoop, sift and pour, as well as converse with their friends and work cooperatively.  During September, the table was filled with warm bubbly water and assorted measuring and pouring toys.  Water play is

always a calming sensory experience for our little friends.  Next, the children experimented with wet sand along with scoops, buckets and sand molds.  Last week, the children were able to turn white rice into colored rice by adding small amounts of liquid water color to sandwich bags containing plain rice.  They worked the bag with their hands until the color had been absorbed, then they added it to the table.  This resulted in a very colorful mixture to scoop, measure, sift and pour.  They were very excited to try making different colors.  Coming soon the children will be working with dry sand.

Working with playdough offers the children a chance to strengthen their hand muscles as they squeeze, roll and sculpt the dough.  Numerous tools are available including scissors, spatulas, rolling pins, pizza-type cutters, pattern tools, and cookie cutters.  Working with the dough is a calming activity and it feels great to sense the cool, smooth dough and to be able to experiment without the expectation that something must be “made”.  It also provides an opportunity to engage in conversation with the peers and to share the tools.  The color of the playdough changes every two weeks.  We began the year with blue and then added yellow.  The  children were very excited to see that a beautiful lime green emerged when they mixed the two.  The dough has been red for the last two weeks, and this week we will provide orange dough.

At the two easels in the creativity room, we usually offer paint of some kind on one easel and another art media on the other.  Most children love to paint at the easel and they have been busy creating masterpieces using paint brushes and various colors of tempera paint.  We started off with blue, adding yellow after two weeks.  After that red and yellow were available.  This week orange and brown tempera is available.  The children always enjoy seeing new colors emerge when they experiment with the properties of paints and brushes as they develop and freely implement their own creative ideas.  The children are more concerned with the process of painting than with what the finished