The “loose parts” cart.
It has rolling wheels for easy transporting, three tiers of shelves to stack bins on, and is approximately 1 foot wide by 4 feet long.
Mostly, the goal is to have non-representational objects (other than the plastic animals and some toy cars, which often aren’t needed/used) to build with imaginative creativity.
Bins of paper tubes, various building block items, pipe cleaners, feathers, burlap strips, ribbons, pine cones, various sticks items…etc, etc.
A picture of some bear dens that the kindergarten class next-door made when the teacher borrowed the loose parts cart to have them do a little story studio to reinforce the learning they’ve been doing about bear life cycles in hibernation.
Sometimes we co-teach a lesson like that and other times when my blocks for team teaching are all filled, people just borrow the cart and wheel it to their class.
A second picture of some bear dens that the kindergarten class next-door made with the loose parts cart.
If possible, will sometimes leave the kids scenes put together off to the side, somewhere to come back to on another day for further reflection and storytelling. Other times if things need to be cleaned up at the end of a session, we take photos of the scenes so they can be put on screen or print it out later for further work.
Years ago, I built up a cart full of a collection of funky junk #LooseParts for some #StoryStudio #PlayLearning.
Gist:
Give kids building prompt tied to curricular learning; they make a scene; then, do either/both oral/written reflection/story/pres about what they’ve created to show knowledge.
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