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📖 First Grade Story Time: Here are some texts aligned to our Play SEL units.
First Grade Play: Our Year
First Grade Play: Our Year
What is Play Based Learning?
Research tells us that “young children learn best when the learning is active, engaging, meaningful, iterative, socially interactive, and joyful - when it is playful.”
Play Block at KIPP MA is dedicated time several days per week for teachers and students to engage in guided play together. Teachers design exploration and learning opportunities for students, and students discover new ideas and apply their academic and social learning with their teachers and peers.
The core indicators of playful learning in our classrooms are:
Community: We learn from ourselves and from each other. We celebrate each other, we collaborate and build onto each others’ ideas, and we work through our conflicts.
Purpose: Our play is joyful, fulfilling, challenging, and meaningful. Our ideas are valuable and worth pursuing and sharing.
Discovery: Our creativity and curiosity fuels what and how we learn. We choose, experiment, iterate, and reflect as we discover new things about ourselves and our world.
Play Lesson Structure
Play Lesson Structure
Each Play Block lesson follows a 3-part structure:
Launch: 5 minutes
In the Launch, students gather on the rug and the teacher introduces a new material for Play, offers a social-emotional focus, or offers an academic challenge.
The teacher names what Play Stations are open for the day and students use the Choice Chart to select their stations.
Play: 20 minutes
Students play at their selected station. In the final few minutes of play, students clean up their station.
Share: 5 minutes
In the Share, students gather back on the rug. The teacher and students can give shout-outs for students who exemplified the social-emotional focus of the day, the teacher can lead students in a reflection on their learning from play, or a few students can share out an idea or project they created that day.
Classroom Set-up + Materials
Classroom Set-up + Materials
First Grade Play Based Learning: Unit by Unit
Unit 1: Getting to Know Our Class || August 20 - August 29
Unit 1: Getting to Know Our Class || August 20 - August 29
Unit 2: We Learn at Our Stations! || September 2 - October 3
Unit 2: We Learn at Our Stations! || September 2 - October 3
Unit 3: We Work as a Team! || October 6 - December 5
Unit 3: We Work as a Team! || October 6 - December 5
Unit 4: We Can Show We Care! || December 8 - February 6
Unit 4: We Can Show We Care! || December 8 - February 6
Unit 5: We Are Problem Solvers! || February 9 - April 17
Unit 5: We Are Problem Solvers! || February 9 - April 17
Unit 6: We Create and Imagine! || April 27 - June 19
Unit 6: We Create and Imagine! || April 27 - June 19
Year at a Glance
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