Darian Gravestock
5/3/15
TTE 309
Play Center Reflection
Teachers often sigh in relief when they take their students out to recess. They want the children to run, jump, and wiggle out all their energy before they re-enter the classroom for more learning. I wanted to change the idea of recess being “just play” into something more educational in nature. During preschool children explore various educational themes through play. Dramatic play is an outlet for young children to explore adult ideas in a child-friendly setting. There is a reason dramatic play is the most popular play center within the classroom. Through dramatic play children are able to act out various “scenes” that they have seen within their lives outside of school. Dramatic play creates a space where children can explore language, role-playing, relationships, leadership, and cooperation with others. With this in mind I wanted to bring the ever-popular dramatic play center outside to create an outdoor classroom. I chose a farmers market because it is something that all of the children have experienced while attending my placement preschool. The idea behind this play center was to create a new space for them to explore the idea of a farmer market with various props that promote curiosity, socio-emotion, language, literacy, and mathematical concepts.
Materials needed:
Shelf to display food, baskets to hold veggies, play veggies, veggies from the class garden, balancing scale from the classroom, price tags, play money, bags to hold bought food, register from the classroom, clipboard with label stickers and a pen, 2 child aprons.
*optional: fake flowers and/or farmer market signs.

Before going outside I gathered the class on the carpet and read “To Market, To Market!” by Anne Miranda. It was a great introduction into a discussion about farmer markets and the student’s experiences with them. Since there is a mini market after school on Wednesdays at my placement preschool many of the children have experienced a farmers market.
I recently discovered that my case study child’s mother has often taken her grocery shopping at stores (i.e. Food city, Fry’s, etc.) and to the mini farmers market that is outside of the school at the end of the day. Within the classroom she has participated in our class garden, so she has some knowledge about how some of the vegetables are grown before they reach the markets and the grocery stores. The idea behind using both fake food and real food is that my case study child and the other children will be able to use their senses to compare the differences of weight, texture, and smell. This was also a great opportunity for my case study child and the other children to better visualize how a farmers market works.
My main role as a teacher was to set up the play center before the children came outside.
I also aided with tying the aprons and intervened in arguments when requested by the children. I decided that I wouldn’t place myself within the center very often because the time the children spent outside was meant to be free-choice. I felt my presence would have impeded their creative play. So, the first day the center was set up I stood silently close by taking pictures, videos and answering questions they had for me. I wasn’t surprised when all of the children gravitated towards the center all at once; after all it was new to them. I was, however, surprised that they used both the table, with the register, and the book shelf, with the food, as two separate checkout counters. I documented with photographs the lines they had created at both check-out counters. The children need little explanation about the play center and even made connections to the school’s market. They explored the role of both the cashier and the customer, which I had

anticipated, but they explored roles that I did not think of (i.e. bagger, door greeter, and shelf stocker/ general employee). The center was open for about a week. Shockingly, every day was a different experience than the last.
Throughout the week the class was small in numbers, so with the addition and subtraction of various children changed the energy within the play center. For example, on the first day the play center opened there were 9 children in total. All of them worked well with each other and explored their roles deeply. There were some instances where children watched each other explore a role to see if they were acting out their role in a different manner. The second day the children began to fight over the register, so defending of one’s role began to occur. To resolve the conflict of identifying employees and customers the students used the label stickers as name tags. Word spread amongst the classmates that if you were wearing a name tag you were working at the market. On the third and fourth day the children explored the concepts of sharing the food with other customers. One child took on a leadership role by announcing that the store was closed, so he could restock the shelves with food. This led to understanding that even grocery stores can run out of food on occasion. It further led into the exploration of trading.
Some children traded baby clothes for money to buy food. While others traded kind words for some food. One interaction of this I viewed contained the following dialogue between two students:
“You have more food than me…”
“Yea.”
“I need to feed my baby cuz she’s hungry!”
“Ok, ok. You have a banana, an egg –”

“I want the purple food, please. No the big, purple one. Thank you!”
“Can I come eat at your house?”
“Yea.”
On the fifth day, more children branched out and started playing different games apart from the center. A problem arose when all of the food within the store was bought. This was resolved by the intervention of a substitute teacher that suggested they sell the baskets that were left on the shelf. However, it also led to exploring more elaborate ideas such as robbing the store.
The children that had left the play center to play with the tricycles chose to use them as get away cars after they robbed all of the money from the farmer market’s register with pistol fingers.
Eventually this further led to them chasing after the children that had grocery carts filled with food. Children were yelling with a mixture of excitement and fear. As any person would be in that particular moment, I was shocked by the amount of chaos that was occurring before my eyes. However, before I had a chance to react to the commotion two children pretending to be super heroes decided to stop the robbers with their “super powers” and threatened to call the real police in an attempt to bring peace back to the playground. I stood in amazement at all the different types of ideas they were exploring without even considering how complex some of those ideas were for their age.
On the sixth and I intervened a little bit by entering their play when I announced that I was a police officer that was there to help stop any robbers. When the other children didn’t give the same chaotic reactions the robbers had received the previous day the idea of robbing seemed to fizzle out quite quickly.

While I had expected issues of sharing to arise amongst the children, I hadn’t foreseen such chaotic results towards the end of the week. In the future I would consider placing either a garbage can to store the “eaten” food that would provide a different way for the market to retrieve more food. Or incorporate a small “garden” that the food could be planted in and retrieved. However, I almost hesitant to include any sort of process to aid in restocking the market’s shelves because I don’t believe it would have been nearly as effective. This was an opportunity for children to think critically and creatively, which is a life skill that is essential when making connections with the concepts that were explored within the play center.
To further their connections I would consider reading more than one market book and discussing the various types of markets there are (i.e. swap meet, farmers market, and roadside stands). At the end of the day the children within my placement preschool write in their daily journals, so I feel as though it was a missed opportunity to have them write/ draw about what they had experienced within the center. Never-the-less there were great connections between formal reading and writing when they created their own name tags (and at one point created them for each other) because it was a chance for them to practice their writing without their name cards as a reference. It was also a great assessment of what letters they are recognizing within not only their names, but each other’s names. Which is an early emergent literacy skill that will be built upon in their future classes.