Kit Of Essential Play Materials Teachers guide and kit manual

Preface

The development of various skills within each domain is a continuous process; details about the stages of growth can be found in standard books on child development and teachers’ manuals. Children’s learning does not occur in narrowly defined subject areas; development and learning are interdependent. Based on this, there remains a massive task of capacity building in caregivers, teachers, etc.

This book Kit of Essential Play Materials accompanied with a kit, has been carefully developed keeping in mind the need to cater to the children of ECCE centres (Anganwadi) and similar centres in the country.

This book will generally accompany the kit having 21 broad items, which could be divided into 314 pieces.

The items have been designed with a view to fostering

cognitive development

■socio-emotional development

gross and fine motor skills

language development and

musical intelligence in the pre-school child.

In the case, where the book is not accompanied with a kit, clear methodology has been given so that a similar kit with low cost materials available locally, can be built. Material, dimensions of each item (in millimetre), specification, how to use, how to care for groups with special needs, hints for fabrication with locally available materials…have been elaborated upon. A group of 40 pre-schoolers could be easily engaged at a given time in individual and group activities using these play materials and toys.

At the sensory motor and pre-operational stages of cognitive development of the child, the teacher or caregiver is as important as the mother. Hints and clues from this book can be profusely used to decide when and how to go about –

Independent play, cooperative play, play involving motor skills, visual play, linguistic play, musical play, mathematical play, free/structured play, symbolic play, with the help of the play materials described here. EVA (Ethylene Vinyl Acetate) has been used as raw material for many items in the kit to replace particularly wood considering cost and other factors.

I sincerely hope that this book and the kit would be of great benefit to the users. I thank all those who have put in their valuable time and effort in making this package. Special thanks are due to the contributions of Sh. Parmod Sharma, a dedicated graphic assistant and puppet artist in the CIET, for giving shape to ideas; Sh. Narendra Sharma, Sh. Balbir Singh, Sh. Amarnath of NIE workshop for the fabrication of the kit; Sh. Anil Nayal for draughtsmanship; Sh. Purnendu Kumar Barik for copy editing, and participants in the two workshops for giving suggestions on the package.