This month the children have been very invested in the dramatic-play centre, pretending to serve donuts and coffee. As a class we came up with the idea of building our very own shop. We brainstormed potential store ideas and took a vote. The options were a pizza store, a baker that served coffee and donuts or and ice cream shop. After some friendly debate, the winning choice was an ice cream shop. The children were so excited, they began planning right away. Carter said the shop needed a menu so we began to make a list of different flavours of ice cream. Samarth and Rudra mentioned that the store also needs an open and closed sign. The following day we brought materials such as cardboard, tape and construction paper and we began to build. While assembling the shop, we ran into some difficulties with keeping the pieces of cardboard together. Fife and Rudra concluded that we needed to glue the cardboard together instead of taping it.
We decided to reevaluate our next steps for the construction to be successful so we started over with new cardboard. The children came up with a new plan to use glue and it worked better than the first idea. Our next steps were to design a fun colourful shop. Robynne, Olivia and Emilia suggested we make the shop rainbow colour to showcase the different flavours of ice cream. They each glued sheets of construction paper to the frame to create a beautiful rainbow.
This shop was a labour of love and by the end of the week, we decided to surprise the children with the opportunity to serve real ice cream from the shop they had worked so hard on. Eli and Carter volunteered to be the employees for the grand opening of the shop. Each child went up to the shop to “buy” a scoop of ice cream.
As children engage in social play, they negotiate, collaborate and communicate with each other to facilitate new ideas and gain new perspectives from their peers. This experience enabled each child to demonstrate their different capabilities and skills while adding their own personal characteristics to the ice cream shop. Well done School-Age One!
