Week 7- March 2nd

   Takeaways: 

• Play is a necessity not a luxury because playing is how children make sense of their world and develop social skills.

• Play helps build a social brand, regulate emotions, increases attention span and memory., increases functioning on the frontal cortex.

• Instead of only having rules in the classroom, it is good to have principles, such as forgiveness, respect, responsibility, among others.

Reflection:

Often times we do not make the time for our students to play, there is still this idea where students should be quiet and working. We think that when they are like that it is when they are actually learning, but it is not like that. They also learn a lot by playing and it is the best way of learning for kids. To cover the curriculum is very important, but to help our student develop is also important. We need to let our students play so they can socialize and learn more social and emotional skills. For example, it is by playing that kids learn to create boundaries and to respect them. Besides, there are different types of play, the one that I just mentioned is social play, but we can also include activities with object play and dramatic play. Kids love those!

Activity in class:

An activity to check on our students is tell them a context or situation and le them draw how they picture that situation. For example, one day we did this activity in class and the teacher told us that we should picture ourselves in our happy place with the people or things that we would like to have there.

References

Wallace, K. (2021). Counselling Skills and Play Therapy. [pdf]. 

Wallace, K. & Lewis, P.J. Chapter 1: Play. In Trauma informed teaching through play art narrative (PAN) Boston, MA: Brill/Sense.

Took Communication Quiz (see on section "Tests and Quizzes")