Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

During third term at our kindergarten we run a program called “Star of the Week” where each child is a star for a week. They wear a star badge, have a special chair to sit in, have first choice at activities, talk all about themselves, do their favourite activity with a small group of children helped by one of their parents, and so on.

One of the highlights is that Donna draws around the shadow of their faces and cuts their silhouettes out of black paper. These are then mounted on coloured card of their choice, laminated and placed around the room for all to see and admire.

The interest shown by the children in how shadows are made, led onto the following activity.

shadows in the winter sun

We had been experiencing some quite miserable weather here in Melbourne, hence the mud play. One day, a weak, winter sun came out, enough to cast shadows on the ground.

We asked one of our children to make an interesting body shape and we drew around him.

Then he lay down on the shadow and the children could see how elongated it was compared to his actual size thanks to that low morning winter sun!

When the children came inside, some of them grabbed various objects from around the room and popped them onto the mat in a sunny spot to see what shadows they made as well.

This led to lots of experimentation from the children inside and out.

Outside they enjoyed drawing around each other’s shadows …

…as well as different play equipment.

We asked our young friend to stand in the same spot just before lunch time and again drew around his shadow. It was fascinating to see how far the sun had moved and what direction it went in just a few hours. His shadow had shortened considerably too, although it was still bigger than he was.

Over the next week or so this really took off and an exciting thing we found was that the children (generally a small group of boys) who are not usually interested in picking up a pencil or paint were doing all sorts of wonderful chalk drawings on the concrete!

We came across this great set of shadow boxes in a second hand shop and we have used them in a multitude of ways all over the kinder.

Here we teamed them with some very popular plastic insects we bought from a local discount store.  We set them up on the floor inside a large cardboard box lid lined with a laminated board we got from reverse art. It has a texture that resembles smooth pebbles set in concrete, so we added some more textures through natural materials and spread a soft cow hide on the floor for texture and comfort.

The children were able to move the boxes and props around to suit their play, adding extra bits & pieces from the shelves as needed.

Being down at floor level, where beetles and insects are found, made the children’s play more dramatic. As the floor takes away boundaries, the children were able to spread their play out as they marched their insects back and forth across the floor and around the table and chair legs nearby.

We witnessed some lovely imaginary play here and heard some great language as the children closely examined the insects, discussing their names and habitats.

As part of our Star of the Week program, our parents came into kinder to do activities with the children. One made the lovely old fashioned ‘open, shut them’ games which the children just loved!

We found that the children needed a bit of help getting the folds right as it is a bit complicated, but they are great at squashing the fold lines to make them good and sharp.

On the outside sections they had colours - the words and a matching coloured spot .

On the next two layers they had numbers…

… and in the middle some fun actions, such as “Do 15 star jumps” and “Make a monkey face and noise”.

When we come back from the term holidays, we will try doing a big one of these with a large group of children. Let’s see now – there is colour and number recognition, fine and gross motor activity, literacy, playing with a friend, having fun … What a great thing to do!