What Your Kids Learned at Our Holiday Market

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 Our Holiday Market this year was a huge success! The children were involved in the planning and preparation for the market, from making signs and categorizing the items for sale, making decorations, and shopping and wrapping their gifts. Best of all, during all the fun your children were also learning valuable lessons and skills without even knowing it!

There were many cognitive areas targeted, but let's take a look at a couple of specific aspects of the market and see what was going on under the surface in your child's learning. 

Taking Stock

As a class we discussed and named the types of categories our market might contain. Once we determined the categories, we went through each bag of donated gift items and the kids identified where they belonged. We then counted up how many items we had in each category.

Categorization helps kids understand the similarities, differences, and connections between things. Counting allows kids to practice one-to-one correspondence and rote counting. Categorizing and taking inventory also work on memory, number sense, and problem-solving.

Wrapping Up

Gift wrapping is challenging for young children for a number of reasons. In order to wrap, you have to be able to determine how much paper you need to use. physically fold the paper around the gift, and hold everything together with tape. Wrapping allows children to visualize and determine spatial relationships, using informal measuring to get the right amount of paper. Motor planning is required to determine how to place the item to be wrapped onto the paper and where to fold and tape. Both fine motor and visuospatial skills are also engaged as children actually wrap a gift and navigate through the different steps it takes to wrap: folding one section at a time, taping one area before moving on to the next. Students also make fine motor gains while learning to tear off tape from a dispenser, using gradation of force to accomplish this task.  Filling out name tags helps with letter recognition and writing.





 

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