This month at RisingOaks Early Learning | Saint John Paul II, School-age 1 has enjoyed the warm weather outdoors playing in the field. As the children play, they have explored their environment looking for bugs, rocks, sticks, and looked at the changing leaves on the trees. Many questioned why the leaves were changing and with curiosity asked “will they come back?” Those searching for bugs found spiders, ants, and little beetles around the rocks and in the grass. We watched to see what they were doing and for some brave enough, they picked them up to share with their peers. Aeddan questioned about the ants asking, “why are there so many ants?” As well as asked about whether the queen ant was out with the others. We talked about how the queen usually stays in the ant’s home to stay protected and how the other ants all gather together in areas they find food. In addition to the children’s exploration, we had many who used their environment as a stage for dramatic play. Many of the girls in the classroom, pretended to play house calling it ‘mommy and daddy.’ They used the bridge as their home giving roles to each other such as mom, dad, child or pet and then went about their play making up different stories. One story included Savannah being the princess named Poison Ivy where she had special powers turning the grass into poison. The bridge became the safe area for the family, and like the floor is lava, anyone in the grass became poisoned by the princess. We also had Aeddan and George who became frogs in the grass. Hopping along they looked around for bugs and strawberries. Every couple of hops, one would yell “a strawberry!” Together, they would hop over and pretend to eat the strawberry.
