Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

One day one of the children brought in a case moth he had found in his garden.

He had been following this little creature around his garden for about a week, finding it in a different place each day.  The children were totally fascinated by the way it crawled around carrying its home along with it as it looked for food.

We explained to the children that the process a caterpillar goes through to become a moth or butterfly is called metamorphosis and we used the story of The very hungry caterpillar to explain it in a language they could understand. The very ordinary caterpillar is another lovely book they enjoyed.

They also had a great time acting out the story with The very hungry caterpillar felt board.

Metamorphosis is a fascinating concept for children so we pulled out a couple of metamorphosis puzzles on the life cycles of the butterfly and the frog.

In keeping with the tadpole / frog interest we are currently experiencing at kinder we set up a frog bog using lots of natural materials, frogs (the odd crocodile or two …  naturally) and our frog metamorphosis set.

Including materials like rocks and logs from our garden the water soon resembled a muddy frog bog. It was spectacular!

We have a wonderful frogbog CD which we played (hidden behind a fern) in the background, which made the play space sound and feel like we really were exploring a natural frog bog.

This CD doesn’t contain music just incredible Australian frog calls. It’s so amazing and the children were fascinated by the sounds real frogs make….not one single gribbet to be heard let alone a gulumph!

We have a great song we taught the children about metamorphosis and Sherry made some fabulous prop cards which the children use to act out the song.

Here are the words to the song – METAMORPHOSIS

Kittens look like cats,

and puppies look like dogs,

so why don’t little tadpoles, look like little frogs.

Bear cubs look like bears,

and little sloths like sloths,

so why don’t caterpillars look like little moths.

Kittens, puppies and other things don’t need a special process.

But caterpillars and tadpoles do.

They go through MET – A – MOR – PHO – SIS!

PS. The case moth was returned to the garden and a few weeks later our young friend discovered the empty case … how wonderful!

You can see some amazing photos of case moths and other incredible insects  through our ‘Moths & Butterflies‘ link.

After learning some fascinating facts about green tree frogs at our recent incursion, we seem to have gone into a bit of a frog frenzy.

Did you know they drink water through their skin? Did you know they peel off and eat their skin weekly? Did you know they catch flies, pop them into their mouths and roll their eyes around and around pushing the food down to their tummies? We didn’t – fabulous stuff!

We have pulled out the old favourite songs such as “Mr Frog jumped out of his pond one day“.

And a couple of the children’s favourite books, “Picasso the Green Tree Frog” and “Frog Friends“.

We popped out some coloured card, scissors, felt pens and staplers for the children to make their own frogs.

We took the opportunity to have a skill session and reminded them how to do fan folding.

They could make the frogs legs this way if they wished.

Some preferred straight legs.

They were all individual!

Another green tree frog fact: He can change colour to blend into his environment!

We have been talking about solids and liquids using water and freezing it, see our ‘Water Shapes’ post under Science / Technology on September 13th.

The natural progression is to move onto gas and after a very heavy downpour of rain recently followed by brilliant sunshine the children noticed something strange was happening in the playground …

…’smoke‘ (steam) was coming off the shade sails …

… as well as the ground and play equipment!

Naturally this provided us with a great opportunity to talk about what happens when air and water heats up.

We showed the children boiling water and discussed what the steam is. Most children called it smoke at first. They noted how it went up into the air and didn’t fall down to the ground due to the hot air rising.

This led to a by the way discussion about how we need to get down low if we are caught in a fire and another opportunity to reinforce dialing OOO in an emergency following our recent police visit, see our ‘Stranger Danger‘ post under Incursions/Excursions on October 23rd – working with children is never a predictable thing!

Before illustrating how hot air rises, we showed the children an empty bottle and asked them what was in it.  Most said nothing, a couple said air.

We placed a balloon on the top of the bottle and asked the children how we could blow it up from there. Naturally they said we could use our mouth, or a balloon pump but we asked them how we could do it without removing the balloon from the bottle.

Most had no idea but one clever child said to squeeze the bottle, which worked very well.

To illustrate how hot air rises and cold air falls we placed the bottle into some boiling water and slowly the air in the bottle warmed up and went into the balloon making it stand up straight – this always elicits lots of laughter, particularly from the mums!

We then popped the bottle into cold water and as the air cooled the balloon slowly shrank again. This can be repeated a few times until the hot water gets a bit too cool to warm up the air sufficiently.

As the children can’t do this experiement by themselves due to the boiling water factor, a science activity they can do which allows them to have fun with hot air rising, is to make spirals, just like the spiral snakes we made, see our ‘Wild Action and Spirals’ post under Science / Technology on October 27th. Hanging the spirals from a piece of string over a light bulb, the heat from the light warms the air, it rises up, and the spiral gently turns around.

It’s a good idea to turn the lamp on to warm up while the children are preparing their spirals.

Depending on which direction their spiral turned some of the children commented on their spiral winding up or winding down.  One child even said “It looks like my snake is trying to climb up the string to get me!”

More great science! More great fun! More great play based learning!