Creating Invitations for Learning

12/08/2004

Creating Invitations for Learning

"A man who has no imagination has no wings." - Muhammad Ali

Creating Invitations for Learning

In the Beginnings Workshop on "Environments to Engage Children" in the May/June 2004 issue of Exchange, Deb Curtis offers a wide variety of ideas on invitations to children "to wonder, explore, and create in as many ways as possible." She identifies the following "principles for designing invitations":

Exploring: Children are drawn to the sensory aspect of materials.

Principle: Look for collections that have textures, interesting surfaces for touching or looking at or looking through, things that make sounds or move in interesting ways. Natural materials are always a good source for this kind of exploration.

Transforming: Children are completely mesmerized with transforming materials and rearranging the world around them.

Principle: Look for materials and substances that can be changed, moved, reconfigured, or otherwise have some kind of cause and effect quality.

Organizing and Designing: With an interesting, varied collection of materials preschool children will organize them by their attributes or use them in beautiful designs.

Principle: Find collections of materials that have similarities and differences and can be used for sorting, patterning, and designing.

Building and Constructing: Young children like to put things together in relationship to each other, to connect things to other things, and to use building and construction materials to represent many aspects of their ideas and understandings.

Principle: Along with typical early childhood construction materials, seek out interesting shapes and sizes of items for building as well as things that can be used to decorate constructions. I also look for loose parts and recycled materials that resemble parts of something else, such as an airplane wing, a boat shape, or a dinosaur's scales.

Dramatizing: With limited props preschool-age children will turn anything into dramatic play.

Principle: Keep an eye out for props and figures that can be added to any of the above background materials for an adventure or story.

Drawing: Drawing is a natural medium for young children to express their ideas.

Principle: Regularly provide tools for children to draw and write as a part of Invitations.

Reading: Children will thoughtfully study books and visual information related to a collection of props they have been using for exploring and representing.

Principle: Include resource books, stories, photos, posters, diagrams, and instructions to enrich the use of the materials by offering new suggestions and extensions, and support the development of literacy skills.

For the next ten days, all Beginnings Workshops will be on sale at a 28% discount. To check out your choices, including "Environments to Engage Children," go to: http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/0478

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