My students need a cash register, market stand, and play food items to sell for their dramatic play center that will compliment our two month study of markets!
My students are disabled preschoolers with disabilities ranging from speech and language delays to severe autism. They struggle to learn concepts that often come naturally to their friends, but they are similar in that they LOVE TO PLAY and they do their best learning while immersed in play.
Play is a catalyst for language development and it is how children make sense of the world around them.
In order to assist children with disabilities to learn language, play, and social skills, I am often an "interior designer" of learning centers and play spaces. In my classroom, we do lots of shifting, building and recreating so that the play centers become a "home" or a "store" or an "ocean." Some of my students are very literal and concrete and lack the ability to pretend. In order to assist them in learning the skill of substituting items for other items (a block as a phone or a sheet as the ocean), we need to start off with very concrete toys (using a real phone or realistic toy versions of the item) and slowly move toward more abstract toys.
My Project
My students will be exploring the concept of markets through books and actual visits to neighboring stores and farmers markets. My students need a cash register, market stand, and play food items to sell for their dramatic play center that will compliment our two month study of markets! I hope to use the pretend market toys to set up a play market in our classroom and encourage the children to play out the roles and activities they are observing in the markets they visit at school and at home. Through market play, math concepts such as counting bills, science concepts such as sorting products by color or type, and social studies concepts such as the roles of grocers and shoppers are easily incorporated. Throughout, they will learn to play cooperatively, label items and activities, and develop and direct scripts for their play.
For children with autism, playing with toys the way they were designed, pretending, and playing cooperatively with others is incredibly difficult and yet SO IMPORTANT for them to learn.
They will learn to observe the activities of the adults around them and imitate them. In doing so, they will develop their understanding of social roles, of how people live and work together, and how to relate to others and see others' perspectives.
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