THE SCIENCE OF PLAY

BY MARY HELEN PEREZ

Our preschoolers learn through play - experiencing the world by investigating, observing, noticing, questioning, and hypothesizing. Water play engages younger children with the fun of filling and dumping various containers. Children repeat this play until they are satisfied with all the “what ifs” in their mind.

As they get older, they build structures with tubes and funnels, tackling the drippy, messy, overflowing work of water play with a pile of towels and extra clothes. Friends Wyatt Benally and Brodan Morgan enjoyed working together at the water center. While Brodan assembled a stand with funnels; Wyatt filled a newly introduced container and delighted in the pumping action. They noticed each other’s work, smiled, and laughed! In addition to the scientific discoveries in motion, the social emotional impact of working together peacefully is huge.

Sometimes literature inspires our exploration. The book Stuck by Oliver Jeffers tells the tale of a boy getting his kite stuck and his hilarious efforts to get the kite unstuck by chucking other objects at the kite. The students were given supplies to build their own trees and see how many objects could get stuck until the entire tree collapsed. Haylee Gutierrez focused on carefully distributing the objects over her “tree canopy.” Through many trials, Haylee finally fit all the objects from the story onto her tree. Success!

While eating breakfast one morning, a student from a neighboring class asked, “What if I dropped my pear into my cereal?” A great question! His teacher promised that after everyone finished eating, they would conduct a science experiment to find out. All interested students gathered materials and poured their extra milk into the pitcher. One student marked the milk line with a dry erase marker, others added pears.

Many observations were made: “the milk is going up, up, up;” “too many pears;” "it's going to spill.” We drew a final line at the upper most level to demonstrate displacement theory. The teacher encouraged students to observe what happens to bathtub water next time they are in the tub.

Catapults are another great source of study. Students loved the DIY aspect of operating the catapults. They launched pom poms all over the classroom. Brodan Morgan added observations to our writing workshop board and was able to draw our experiment. He proudly shared his illustration and findings with others. Our preschool adventures reveal how naturally inquisitive children are, and how much they are drawn to exploration and discovery through play.