Real Work

Last month, we wrote about the children's growing desire for "real work", especially work that would allow them to use their muscles, engage their joints, challenge their kinesthetic sense, and, like all worthwhile work, give them a sense of accomplishment.
At first, we teachers started to make opportunities for this kind of work in our classroom space...

We added big, heavy, wooden blocks to our toy shelves for large-scale building...

...and filled bottles with interesting- and heavy- things, for lugging around, and adding to the structures that were built with the big blocks.

Of course, we all know that, this time of year, the one place where you can find an endless supply of work is outdoors! With all of the rain this spring, the grass on the playground has been shooting up like crazy!

This looks like a job for a bunch of three-year-olds, who have been ardently honing their scissor skills all winter!

We also had a big project in mind, that would require lots of help. A couple of years ago, a pink, plastic play-house mysteriously showed up on our playground. It turned out that a former student was clearing out a number of outgrown toys and thought that we could use it. Use it we did, until we realized that the Frogs had also outgrown the little pink house.

It was time for it to go in order to make way for bigger and better things!

"Oh no!!! The house got all blown down!!!" was the oft repeated, totally delighted reaction from the Frogs. the got right to work, hoisting the just-heavy-and-awkward-enough-to-be-exciting plastic chunks of house and working together to haul them all the way across the parking lot to the side of the building.

(By the way...does anybody want a slightly used, pink plastic playhouse?)

Now that we had all of this open space on the playground, we were excited to come up with some more opportunities for "real work" to do outside.

Here's where we finally wound up finding our inspiration;

Tuesday Market!!!

After hearing lots of talk from the kids about their gardens at home, and their visits to the various area farmer's markets, we decided to throw out a ball to see if they would run with it;

We set up a market area on the playground!

Their are lots of big jobs for the Frogs to do here! Filling pots with soil and water. Hauling flats of seedlings around the playground in wagons or by hand. Engaging in commerce, (pretend ice cream is the hottest selling item) and figuring out how to work together.

So far, the kids have been really into the idea! At first, they were mostly buying and selling seedlings and flowers. Now that the real farmer's market is starting to feature edible crops, we'll have to get some real produce in there!

Hooray for spring!