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While teaching kindergarten kids looks like a fun and interesting career, ask someone who plays teacher to 3 year olds every single day and you will come to know how tough it is to handle the tiny tots. They ask you weird questions and give weirder answers, most of which are things that their parents feed their tiny brains. It is a teacher’s job to teach the toddlers the things that they ought to learn. From mathematics to English to shapes to other subjects, there are so many things that little ones have to learn about.
Worse, leaving a few, almost all of them seem to hate books and studies. How do you make them stick to one place and get their counting right? Teachers understand that kids are creative and inquisitive by nature. Therefore, they prefer role plays and games over books and black boards. Therefore, teachers always have to introduce new ways of learning.
Play dough seems to be the favorite of many teacher teaching little kids since it can be used for innumerable ways to aid learning and fine motor skills.
Some of these are mentioned as follows:
Alphabets and Numbers: Creating different numbers and alphabets out of clay or play dough is an interesting and fun way of making kids learn basics of Mathematics and English. From recognizing alphabets to learning subtraction and addition, teachers have been successful in teaching them to kids.
Shapes: From squares to circles to triangles and spheres, with play dough, children can learn about different shapes.
Animals and Birds: As the little ones make different animals and birds out of clay, they are learning about them too. Using clay they can understand about carnivorous and herbivorous animals, as well as those that are wild or domestic.
Cooking: Making dough with kids can help them understand how important it is to take safety precautions while in the kitchen. Children learn by observing. They also understand things that are demonstrated to them, therefore, while making edible or non-edible dough, be with them and ask them to help.
Emotions: Though children feel, they do not recognize all the emotions. This is why it is important at the age of 3 or 4 to give them some clay to play with. The soft and gooey texture of the clay is what the children use for expressing most of their emotions. Playing with clay is just like therapy. The children who often feel extremely angry or sad, are given clay to play with so as to keep calm.
Colors: How do children come to learn about colors? They are first made to recognize them. Slowly, they start memorizing them. When kids play with different colored clays, they automatically remember the shades and their names. This is why they are able to recollect the names of the colors better.
Textures: Just like different colors, there are different textures of clay as well. Your kid gets to understand these better when he or she plays with various clays with different textures.
Learning with play dough is one of the tried and tested ways of enhancing learning in little kids. Those kids who find it difficult to concentrate can benefit a lot of playing with dough. Teachers know what is the best for kids.
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