This week in 2B, we faced a challenge, that while not new, had reached a breaking point. Every day, we enjoy playing with the wide assortment of toys in the classroom. The children learn so much through play: negotiation, turn taking, imagination, collaboration, and more. However, this week, the toys seemed to present more of a problem. The children were fighting quite a bit, throwing, and otherwise not taking care of our toys. At clean up time, most friends opted not to participate in cleaning, either leaving the mess for one or two friends cleaning, or for the teachers to clean. After a particularly difficult Thursday, we decided to remove all of the toys from the classroom.
In the morning, we set up painting on the floor, salt art, and crayons/paper. As the children entered the classroom, they quickly selected one of those activities and got right to work. It was not until 9:15am, when someone finally realized the toys were missing, asked where they were, and then just shrugged his shoulders and found something else to do. During our morning meeting, we had a discussion about what happened to the toys. When asked why the toys were taken away, the students immediately said that they had not been cleaning them up or treating them nicely. When we asked if they wanted to talk about a plan about bringing the toys back, the children said no and asked that we continue with our morning meeting.
The rest of the day was relatively calm and fun. We continued with our floor painting and added moon dust as a choice. The children worked together at each activity and stayed engaged for a while. Once they tired of those activities, we all came together on the rug to play a game (What’s missing?) During lunch we made a plan to return the toys on Monday if they promised to clean them up and play nicely with them.
We were not quite sure how the students would react to having no toys in the classroom. We were very pleasantly surprised to find out that the children were not bothered at all. By removing the toys, the children were very engaged in the limited activities that we had out. With all of the toys, there are many distractions and it is easy for them to jump around from activity to activity without spending a significant amount of time engaging with materials. While we will bring back most of the toys on Monday, we plan to find days to have another go at a toy free day.
