Mind Explosion - Day 3

Today I went to a conference called Ready, Set, Play. It was put on by the Beaverton School District and had a wonderful keynote speaker by the name of Soobin Oh of the Children's Institute. I also had two classes with Kristi Mraz, the author of Kids 1st From Day One and Purposeful Play. I am a bit of a fangirl about Kristi, I have to say.

What did we work on? We worked on play, of course! But, mostly we worked on creating a way of teaching through play that is culturally responsive. While I have so many thoughts swirling inside my head right now, I am trying to hone in on the major take-aways from today.

Kristi Mraz talks about Stuart Brown's Play Personalities. Thinking along these lines we are going to create virtual play. Students will get materials to bring home (loose parts) and we will create small group play via Zoom. Sound hard? You bet it is! Hence the mind explosion. More on the logistics of this later, but the overall idea is that we will get small groups together and we will encourage them to play while on a Zoom meet. Our goal is to build language, collaboration, and social skills.

Another take away was from Soobin, who spoke about Persona Dolls. I had not heard of these before and I have to say, I am very excited about them. These are dolls that are special and only visit your classroom for a little while. All dolls have a rich back story and should help the class deal with a problem, whatever it might be at the time. Ideas include diversity, exclusion, empathy, etc. I am very excited to use these this year. Formal persona dolls are almost life size. Because I do not have the money to buy them or the skills to make them I will be using smaller dolls of different ethnicities to tell stories. 

We spoke a lot about singing, physical motions, and building community within the Meets. We want to create a space that children want to come back to. We want to create a space families want to come back to. 

I am attending Day 2 of the conference tomorrow.