As I sat down to write lesson plans I was recently reminded of the value of play. Lately have been reading more and more articles on the need for more play in school. It is something that I whole heartily agree with. I do this all the time with the students I see for speech and language therapy, but with my RTI students I sometimes get away from it. The questions is why? I work with a Kindergarten classroom as part of our RTI process everyday on phonemic awareness, language and writing skills. We divide the class into 4 groups and and each adult has their group for a week. The next week we rotate groups. We do this all year long with the groups changing as the student's needs change. Recently my group of Kindergartners told me how much fun coming to my room was because we get to use Play-Doh. They were right I still do "Fun Friday". We use Play-Doh to make letters, smash on sight words, cover items in a category, build something that starts with a sound, make items that rhyme, follow directions, and describe what we made. Why is it only "Fun Friday?" As I enter the second half of the school year I am going to keep in mind what I have always known, young students learn by playing. With the push for Common Core it is easy to forget that. So this Spring we will play more, laugh more, have more fun and learn more. I look forward to writing about what we do to put play back in my RTI groups not just on Fridays.
Cathy
