3 Hours and 53 Minutes of Content

TARGETAUDIENCE:

Higher education faculty and students, early childhood educators, preschools, K-Grade 3 school administration, parents and home schools networks.

Celebrating over 16,000 students at Udemy, we release this great course describing the ways learning is driven through imaginary play.

It seems every generation of teachers rediscovers the powerful learning that occurs through imaginary play. Vygotsky, over 200 year ago, discovered that it was in this imaginary play space and time that children expand their vocabularies and stretch their social skills. If we are teaching to the whole child, we should be paying attention and creating learning environments that offer and promote imaginary play.

INTHISCOURSEWE PROVIDE:

1. A concrete example of how imaginary play builds relationships within the classroom, across the school community and between families and the classrooms. Join us for a discussion about at tiny woodland elf living on a preschool playground.

2. A review of the contributions to understanding fantasy or imaginary play by author and educator, Vivian Gussin Paley. Paley authored over a dozen books documenting the learning of children through imaginary play and storytelling.

3. A quick review of types of play typical throughout child development, followed by a detailed focus on cooperative play. Cooperative play is the highest form of play, often represented through the imaginary. Classrooms that promote and support imaginary play find that children's social-emotional, language and literacy flourish. As social-emotional development, language and literacy are at the heart of our curriculum, we suggest that promoting and supporting Cooperative Play should be a skillset every educator must cultivate. Appropriately in this section, we discuss the landmark work of Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong, Tools of the Mind.

4. Lastly, we look at an often overlooked space for imaginary play - the outdoor classroom. Extending classroom learning outdoors results in unique educational opportunities. While science and art activities may be routinely offered as outdoor experiences, providing opportunities for children to enter into imaginary play as an outdoor experience is often overlooked. One of the most important elements in developing literacy skills are adults who stimulate children’s interest, scaffold experiences, and respond to children’s earnest initial attempts to communicate through verbal stories, drawings and print. In this final section, we share the creation of a Fairy Village on our playground and the learning driven by children's imaginary world of fairies.

RESOURCEMATERIALS:

Includes book reviews, article reviews, PDFarticle attachments. Article reviews are provided as a means to foster discussion within teaching teams and learning groups within higher education coursework.