Play & Imagination (3 - 5 years)

Learning Guidelines

Massachusetts Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences

The Play and Imagination workshop has been designed to meet the Massachusetts Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences. The purpose of these guidelines, developed by the Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children for the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) in 2003, is to provide a comprehensive view of the development of preschoolers while documenting the experiences that support this development and school readiness. The guidelines are for parents as well as early education and care professionals.

For more information about the guidelines, including definitions of terms, visit http://www.mass.gov/edu/birth-grade-12/early-education-and-care/curriculum-and-learning/.

This workshop aligns with the following guidelines:

Learning in English Language Arts

Children will be able to:

• Observe and use appropriate ways of interacting in a group (taking turns in talking; listening to peers; waiting until someone is finished; asking questions and waiting for an answer; gaining the floor in appropriate ways).
• Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.

• Communicate personal experiences or interests.
• Listen to and use formal and informal language.
• Link letters with sounds in play activities.
• Listen to, recognize, and use a broad vocabulary of sensory words.
• Use their own words or illustrations to describe their experiences, tell imaginative stories, or communicate information about a topic of interest.

Learning in Mathematics

Children will be able to:

• Connect many kinds/quantities of concrete objects and actions to numbers.
• Listen to and say the names of numbers in meaningful contexts.
• Use positional language and ordinal numbers (first, second, third) in everyday activities.
• Sort, categorize, or classify objects by more than one attribute.
• Explore and identify space, direction, movement, relative position, and size using body movement and concrete objects.

Learning in Science and Technology/Engineering

Children will be able to:

• Ask and seek out answers to questions about objects and events with the assistance of interested adults.
• Use their senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste to explore their environment using sensory vocabulary.
• Observe and describe ways that animals, birds, and insects use various parts of their bodies to accomplish certain tasks and compare them to ways people would accomplish a similar task.

Learning in History and Social Science

Children will be able to:

• Discuss examples of rules, fairness, personal responsibilities, and authority in their own experiences and in stories read to them.
• Observe, discuss, and dramatize basic economic concepts such as buying and selling, producing, and consuming.
• Observe and discuss the various kinds of work people do outside and inside their homes.

Learning in Health Education

Children will be able to:

• Build body awareness, strength, and coordination through locomotion activities.
• Build awareness of directionality and position in space.
• Use both sides of the body to strengthen bilateral coordination.
• Build upper body strength and stability to gain controlled movement of shoulders.
• Use eye-hand coordination, visual perception and tracking, and visual motor skills in play activities.
• Recognize and describe or represent emotions such as happiness, surprise, anger, fear, sadness.
• Practice independence and self-help skills.

Learning in the Arts

Children will be able to:

• Explore activities and vocabulary related to movement, balance, strength, and flexibility.
• Express themselves freely through movement.
• Use dramatic play, costumes, and props to pretend to be someone else.
• Create scenarios, props, and settings for dramatizations and dramatic play.
• Create characters through physical movement, gesture, sound, speech, and facial expressions.