[Aperte o play] - Socio-emotional education

Theoretical Foundation

[ SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL EDUCATION- CASEL ]

In the preparation of Aperte o PLAY, we combined maker play (manipulating materials and objects, making and re-making, organizing, re-thinking and creating) with literature and, as expected, with social and emotional learning (SEL) - a process through which people acquire and apply knowledge, skills and attitudes of PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE in Early Childhood Education.

Educators, families and students, community-based organizations and researchers all over the world have the institution Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) as reference. The five interrelated areas of competency are: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

For Aperte o PLAY, we chose readings that would naturally provide us fertile ground to focus on one of the competencies, emphasizing one specific skill per story, as you can see in the framework bellow.

[ MAKER SKILLS ]

In each story, we work on one distinct Maker Skill when we explore what the narrative naturally offers us as context. For maker educators, the main goal must be to help students to understand that the world is flexible and may be changed to meet the needs of the people concerned.

In order to attain this objective, we need to exercise the Three Maker capacities: looking closely (people, objects, situations), exploring complexity (understanding how parts connect, how other people feel about challenges and multiple perspectives) and finding opportunities to apply what one knows (or what one needs to learn to be an agent of positive change in the world).

[ The Third Educator ]

In Aperte o PLAY, we explore Loris Malaguzzi’s idea - the space as the “third educator”. For each story, we propose the choice of open-ended materials, which may be used in several ways to allow children to create.

Image: Freepik - Credit: Rawpixel.com

FIND OUT WHICH FABLES WERE SELECTED!

Here you can find the texts of the fables selected as well as their illustrations. And after you go over the fables you can also download material for printing or projection, the narrated version of the stories (Audiobooks), and our E-Book with everything in it! Access is granted here free of charge!

And don’t forget to share it with your fellow educators!

The more people accessing this material, the stronger our network will be for Early Childhood Education teachers who want to enter the Maker Education universe!