Play Podding

What is 'Play Podding' at LCPP?

Play Podding at LCPP is the grouping of 4-6 children who participate in the LCPP program for 4 mornings or afternoons per week from 9am-12pm or 1:30pm-4:30pm. During a pandemic reality, the importance of supporting the social and emotional development of young children while adhering to safety guidelines is crucial. Through Play Podding, LCPP is able to address a variety of challenges that have emerged as a result of living through a pandemic. A few of them are:

While Little City Play Partners is not exactly a home or school setting, Play Podding in many ways is meant to mirror a combination of these environments. In creating a familiar, comfortable and safe environment, children develop a deeper intrinsic desire to explore, discover and learn about their world. Children are able to:

A closer look at a morning Play Pod:

While Little City Play Partners is not exactly a home or school setting, Play Podding in many ways is meant to mirror a combination of these environments. In creating a familiar, comfortable and safe environment, children develop a deeper intrinsic desire to explore, discover and learn about their world. Children are able to:

Each Play Pod session is thoughtfully structured to maintain a routine that helps children feel safe in a predictable learning environment. Within this structure children are provided with the freedom to explore and develop their inner lives.

Play Pod sessions offer the familiarity of a schedule and routine that children are used to (and rely on!)Within this structure, children start the session playing and working with developmentally appropriate open ended materials to discover and process their world.By engaging in Responsive Circle, children then have the opportunity to actively reflect on their experiences and their play with careful encouragement and guidance from expert facilitators, further deepening their understanding and insight.

Open Ended Play:

Children begin each session with child-directed Play. Facilitators offer a variety of open ended materials (ie blocks, playdough, paint, duplos, legos, art materials) in exploring, building, creating and engaging socially. Play Pod facilitators support children in their play and explorations by encouraging the expansion of their ideas, offering constructive feedback, modelling language and thoughtfully problem solving.

In their spontaneous play children display an imaginative collection of themes including: the separation experience, ideas around ‘danger’ and ‘safety’, family dynamics, peer relationships and countless others.

Responsive Circle:

In Responsive Circle, Play Podders come together to reflect on their play and on their experiences. Facilitators thoughtfully guide children in comfortably sharing and expanding their ideas, thinking critically and building a deeper sense of self awareness and community. The Responsive Circle experience naturally lends itself to building executive functioning skills, language development, and fostering purposeful connections to name a few.

Playful Healing:

Playful Healing can support children in expressing their feelings and fears through the natural activity of play. At LCPP, Playful Healing incorporates a select variety of developmentally appropriate materials to offer children an opportunity to hone in on their life experiences and clarify their world in order to make sense of it.

Depending on the group, one of the tools used in Playful Healing is the practicing of emotional responsiveness through the ‘Teddy Bear Curriculum’.

When children in a community experience loss and trauma, Teddy Bears can be an important tool for facilitating the healing process. Weaving Teddy Bears into an emergent curriculum also enhances pretend play skills, strengthens sense of self and fosters symbolic play. The Bears are essentially used as representations of emerging self-concept and give children a way to acknowledge emotional and social ideas that are a result of disruption, loss, trauma, and confusing experiences in their lives. Storytelling and Book Writing, Anti-Bias Curriculum and Creative Works are a few other techniques utilized with Play Pods.

Partnering with Parents is an integral part of the LCPP experience. Each week there will be 90 minutes of parent education: 60 minutes are devoted to individual family sessions and 30 minutes will focus on group Parenting Pod discussions

While Little City Play Partners is not exactly a home or school setting, Play Podding in many ways is meant to mirror a combination of these environments. In creating a familiar, comfortable and safe environment, children develop a deeper intrinsic desire to explore, discover and learn about their world. Children are able to:

Additional information: