Sesame Street sings about Play Planning

We’re grateful for our longstanding friendship with Sesame Street. We were thrilled when they reached out and wanted to learn more about our approach to facilitating make-believe play, and the important of planning play. 

It’s one thing to witness Play Planning in a Tools preschool or kindergarten, and it’s a whole other ballgame seeing it on national television. Thanks to our friends at Sesame Street, children around the world have now been exposed to the Tools approach of planning before play. They created a whole song about Play Planning for make-believe play. 

If you’re new to Tools, Play Planning is an age-appropriate way of leading children to plan out loud, use gestures, and then draw or write to plan what they want to play after choosing the center they will go to.. For example, “I am going to be a grocery clerk” or “I am going to buy apples..” Depending on the child’s unique abilities, they will progress from drawing their plan to representing the words and sounds in words using Tools Scaffolded Writing. 

Play Planning is a key part of what differentiates Tools high-level play from other play. Tools preschoolers participate in make-believe play and Tools kindergarteners do dramatization. Tools play both meets the child where they are and stretches their capacity to “stand a head taller” as Vygotsky said. In play, children are capable of so much more because they adopt a set of rules and stay in roles that are naturally inherent to play. And by doing so, they’re developing the self-regulation they’ll need for all of school and life. Not to mention how meaningful the entire process is, because children are intrinsically motivated to participate in play.

Now it’s your turn to take a peek at Sesame Street’s creative capture of Play Planning. Here’s Andy Grammer with his friends Elmo, Abby and Rosita! Notice the ways they use props to help build the worlds they’re creating. Look closely and you’ll see a cardboard pirate ship, car and instruments for a whole band. What else do you see?