K3-b

Housing

It was a free-play session. The children were free to visit the various learning corners in the classroom. One of the corners was the children’s artwork corners. This corner displays the dream houses made by the children in order to encourage peer learning. These houses were previously featured in a show and tell session where the children were to talk about their creation. The construction materials for these houses were all waste materials. Following this peer learning task, the children had to complete a recording form about their dream houses.

1) No plastic blocks were used in the construction of the dream houses. The children simply gave lives to cardboard boxes and shoe boxes that would have otherwise gone to waste. Some children had taken great care to create a staircase using paper so that there could be two levels in the house.

2) Language and literacy activities were embedded in the activities. Children learnt vocabulary items (e.g. names of materials, names of objects found in different rooms of a house) relating to their dream houses. By integrating the teaching of “reuse” with language, precious curriculum time was saved.