Learning Story – “Elisapea and Ava”

What Happened? 

In this image, you can see Elisapea wearing the pink snow suit and Ava is wearing the green snow suit with a blue hat. In this photo, the girls were creating their own house together. They were working towards a plan they made. Ava was helping Elisapea by arranging her imaginary meals for us. I encouraged the girls and I participated in their ‘imaginary play bubble’.

This happened in the morning right before lunch started. I believe it took them 30 minutes to complete their house Their verbal communication was positive and outgoing. I noticed Elisapea kept organizing the branches and making the house neater. Ava took a pause during the task, then started to climb over a tree stump. The area they were in had a lot of thick snow and quite a few trees and not many other Bushkids were in the same area as them. Elisapea finished off her house by applying the green bushes on her ’window’ to cover the sunshine. The weather at that time was warm and sunny. 

Why is this meaningful? 

I noticed Elisapea was determined to apply more finishing touches to her new house. She kept adding details such as windows, making utensils (bowls, spoons) and curtains. In this image she lines up some sticks to make the walls. I asked her “what are these sticks lined up for?”. She responded, “this is for my house, I can look at my window and spy on people, and they can’t see me”. I am assuming she needed the walls so they wouldn’t see her. I also noticed Ava enjoyed making her pretend soup. She would ask me to “pass me the salt and pepper”. It looked like she enjoys the idea of cooking and adding ingredients by the way she pretended and stayed engaged with it. When spending time with Elisapea and Ava, I connected with them and got to understand what they liked to do. I got to see their interest in different activities.

What Next?

If we play in the new house they created, I could suggest to Ava and Elisapea that we could extend and turn the place into a restaurant, because Eva enjoyed cooking home-cooked meals for us, and I noticed Elisapea liked to decorate her home. She is very creative and detailed in how she wants her place to look. Ava is aware of what kind of ingredients should be added to her meals. I believe they would make a great team if they could create this general idea. I could include myself if I get an ‘invitation’ to their play and encourage and ask other Bushkids members to play and join their restaurant. This would be great for their communication skills and some teamwork. We could even make a plan to cook something for the rest of the Bushkids together – they would decide the menu, the ingredients, how to prepare it and how to serve it safely (considering Covid).