Play is the Foundation for Early Learning
Young children learn through play. Their brains are formatted for playful, physical engagement, and activities. When designing curricula and the daily schedule, think in terms of how to present academic concepts and content, within the framework of play. From birth, children try to engage with their world in physical ways. As they explore, they touch, taste things, and learn cause and effect by seeing what happens as they explore and interact with their world. To some degree, this lasts for a lifetime but is most pronounced and important from birth through third grade. This is a period of development that is defined as early childhood. The approach to learning should include physical activity and unstructured exploration and play, through the day.
Does this mean children are let loose to play with toys all day, without any formal instruction? Some people do this, and children do learn to a certain degree. What has been shown to be most effective is, direct instruction sprinkled like a seasoning through the day, and mixed into the playful activities. Will children learn as much this way as they do if they are sitting at a desk with seatwork? They can learn more through play, if it is done with intention and has your active involvement.
Children naturally want to be like grownups. They emulate adults as they play, working through the things they see adults do. They want to read and write and will engage in these activities, if they are embedded within the framework of play. When they have this opportunity, they happily pursue those opportunities and will grow as readers and writers. They do not need to be pushed. They will volunteer to interact with literacy and math, if it is part of play; they will love to learn!
What do you need? Here are suggestions for supplies and materials for play-based learning. You do not need to go out and buy all of this to start, just use what you have and add as you can. You do not even ever need to have one-hundred percent of what I have listed, this would be the equivalent to a commercial school, but this is to give you an idea of what you can use in your program, as finances allow. Pick and choose and make it your own.
Housekeeping Center
- Play appliances (IKEA has an affordable little stove/sink unit)
- Dishes, pots and pans, etc.
- Dress-up clothing and accessories
- Toy dining table and chairs
- Sofa, chair, ottoman, coffee table
- Doll high-chair, bed, etc.
- Stuffed animals and pet care items
- Baby dolls, clothes, care items
- Offer recipes and little cookbooks (can be homemade or purchased)
- Make an address book with numbers of family and friends
- Set up a restaurant and have order tickets and menus
- Provide pretend money, coins and bills, with a toy cash register
- Doctor office
- Veterinary office
- Pretend car, bus, plane
- Camping setup
- Small white board, eraser, markers
- Supply the center with plain white paper and pencils
- Fast food and shopping bags with logos on them
- Materials to make shopping lists
- Toy shopping cart, groceries, money, cash register
- Storybooks about homes, marketing, restaurants, cooking, and so on
- Dollhouse, dolls, furniture
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
- Hooks to hang clothing and accessories
Blocks Center
- Maps
- House plans
- Books about construction
- Ruler, yardstick, tape measure for measuring
- Paperclips for unconventional method of measuring
- Paper and pencils for drawing plans
- People and animal figures, for richer storytelling
- Vehicles
- Wooden blocks
- Lincoln Logs
- Tinker Toys
- Duplo or LEGO
- Marble Roll
- Magnetic translucent tiles
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
Art Center
- Easel
- Brushes
- Watercolors
- Tempera paints
- Aprons
- Big paper
- Crayons, construction paper crayons, markers, pencils, colored pencils, daubers
- White paper
- Construction paper
- Cards to cut apart
- Homemade blank greeting cards
- Stickers
- Stencils
- Scissors
- Scissors with decorative edges
- Punches
- Stampers and ink
- Magazines to cut up
- Toilet paper tubes
- Alphabet strip
- Art books, posters, for inspiration
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
Writing Center
- Plain white paper
- Lined paper with blank art area at the top
- Lined paper
- Homemade blank books
- Homemade blank greeting cards
- Blank postcards
- Pencils and erasers
- Markers
- Crayons
- Shaving cream
- Sand in a tray
- White board with dry-erase markers and eraser or piece of felt
- Alphabet stampers and ink
- Play Doh and alphabet cutters, stampers, letter templates
- Alphabet strip
- Posters about spelling, grammar, writing conventions
- Posters with writing topic ideas
- Author study books
- Collections of sentence stems and starters
- Spelling words
- Alphabet books
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
Discovery Center
- Light table
- Translucent activity materials (shapes, letters, numbers)
- Magnifying glasses
- Magnets with items that are magnetic and not magnetic
- Engineering and construction materials
- Marble roll
- Trays for materials and activities
- Natural history samples
- Rock collection
- Color exploration tools
- Posters of life cycles, water cycle, rock cycle, etc.
- Butterfly house
- Science books
- Paper, pencils for drawings and notes
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
Math Center
- Paper, pencils, erasers
- Items to count (buttons, pebbles, glass gems, fancy erasers, toys, bottle lids, corks, counting bears, beads, beans, marbles, twigs, leaves, etc.)
- Items to sort by color, size, shape, use, etc.
- Items for making patterns with sample posters
- Laminated 10-Frames with dry-erase marker and eraser or piece of felt.
- Laminated Number Bonds sheets
- 100s chart
- 200s chart
- 2D and 3D shapes examples
- Posters with shape names and attributes
- Counting or pattern cubes
- Tangram tiles and pattern cards
- Story books about math and numbers
- Storage shelving and containers for materials
Library
- Shelves for children’s books
- Book bins
- Rug
- Beanbag chair
- Sofa, chair, coffee table
- Reading encouragement poster
Start small, with what you have and add things as you can. You can find things at garage sales, thrift stores, and in online ads. You can ask for educational items for gifts from friends and relatives. There are wonderful catalogs that sell new materials, but since they sell to schools, they tend to be expensive. Lakeshore, Really Good Stuff, Discovery Education, Discount School Supply, and Amazon.
Books can be purchased used from Amazon and other online sources. You can also check out books from the public library. I have found many wonderful children’s books at local thrift stores. These are also good items to request as gifts from friends and relatives. When starting your homeschool, you could host a type of a “shower,” and include books on your wish list.
There is a wonderful resource for activities that you can download and print at home, Teachers Pay Teachers. You should buy a good color printer (the eco-tank types use less ink) and a laminator. Print the activities onto cardstock and laminate them, for longer life. These activities can be kept in file folders or gallon zip-lock baggies in a file box or cabinet. Amazon also sells mesh bags with zip-lock tops, that work well for this type of material. Each baggie can have the activity board and the dry-erase tools, for a grab-and-go packet.
It’s a nice luxury to have a dedicated room, such as a family room, to set up centers. You can be extravagant and put out small tables for art/writing, math/discovery, the shelving to separate the areas, and area rugs to delineate the various areas. This could look like a pre-K style layout. Or, if you only have a multipurpose room that cannot be designated for a classroom, provide a workspace and storage, and rotate the activities.
One helpful thing for children who are pre-K through 3rd grade is to take photos of what is in each container, print, laminate, and use clear packing tape to attach to the visible side of the container. It’s important to include a label telling what is in the box, so kids learn to associate the word with the picture.
No matter how you organize and run your centers, make sure your students clean up what they were working on, before they get out a new activity. This will require training and prompting, and if they refuse to clean up, they might need to lose that activity for a few days, until they feel ready to be responsible for cleaning up. Be prepared to help them clean up at first, to model it and so that they do not feel overwhelmed.
You can set out the activity you want them to work on, or you can allow them to choose their own. This will depend on your personality and their readiness. Different people are comfortable with different levels of control versus autonomy, and there is no right or wrong answer. You might try one way, and then modify it to suit what works best for you and your child.