Trains Spark Imagination

Our City Study is in full swing and the Trees Class has been enjoying playing with wooden trains in drama. In the Studio, first grade and kindergarten students have been building incredible train tracks and have been generously leaving them built to allow the Trees students to explore and ride the rails during our morning activity times. 

This shared work gives Trees Class students the opportunity to flex and develop some problem-solving, spatial, and turn-taking skills, like when a train is too tall to fit under a bridge, some tracks come apart and need to be put back together, or a friend is using the train or bit of track you were hoping to use.

The teachers have observed how the children have continued to develop from independent and parallel players into collaborative players as the children progress from playing alone, then next to one another, and eventually to playing cooperatively with shared plans and imaginative narratives about where the trains are heading and whom or what they are carrying – ferrying passengers or freight to and from Pennsylvania, into Manhattan from Queens, or over the Hudson River.

This post was written by Ryan Dominguez.