Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Here we are at the beginning of the year again, with our eager students coming from three year old kinder into “big kinder”! It is lovely to see them again, and they seem so to have shot up over the Christmas break. We start them off in half groups for the first few sessions so they can reorientate themselves back into kinder mode and the new children to our center can get to know their new surroundings, friends and teachers in a relaxed manner.

We have set up lots of imaginary play areas …

and irresistible activities …

that are great for small groups of children.

When you have a hunt in your storeroom, it is surprising how many games you may have tucked away that you haven’t used for a long time for various reasons.

We found one when we were tidying up before Christmas which we hadn’t used in a while and thought it would be good adapted for one player, whereas in the past we have had it set up for more.

This time we put it on a small table and added a variety of different coloured pieces – the original discs, along with little owls from one bingo game and clowns from another.

They added a new element to the activity as the children could now mix and match the different items of corresponding colours.

We kept the dice from the original game, with colours on each face, so the children could use it to select the colours if they wanted to …

while others simply preferred the freedom to make their own choices.

Simple, quiet and engrossing, play based learning!

As we’ve mentioned before Reverse Art in Ringwood  is a wonderful recycling depot you can visit and pick up the most incredibly useful stuff.

Small off cuts of dressed pine is always something we seek out …

… as the children love to use the big hammers and nails.

Some of the children have very specific ideas about the things they want to make but mostly it’s just about the nails, the wood and the banging!

It’s great for the children’s hand eye co-ordination and although occasionally they do miss the nail and bang their fingers … it’s important for them to learn limitations. They very quickly learn how hard to hit the nails for them to penetrate the timber and to watch what they are doing at all times or … ooooouch!

The children like to jazz up their creations with different bits and pieces they collect from the invention table.

A group of children asked if they could hammer things onto a small log they found in the garden. They often go back to the log and add more decorations to it. We love to see the children working co-operatively together on projects.

We decided a number of years ago that it would be nice to have the children create group projects we could display for everybody to enjoy.

Once, after we had read the delightful story of elmer by David McKee the children began creating beautiful patchwork pictures by cutting up squares of brightly coloured paper and pasting them to pictures they had drawn themselves.  This gave us the idea of having the children create a group mosaic picture for display, so we introduce them to the basics of mosaic art.

We have lots of bits and pieces in tubs we have collected over the years so the children set out to gather up objects to use for our project. Sorting through everything was great for their fine motor skills as they found items like corks, bottle tops, tiles and glass stones as well as some very tiny beads, buttons and sequins.

We had two pieces of ‘mdf’ given to us by one of our crafty mums which was perfect for the project. We used PVA glue to stick the decorations onto the timber as it is strong and dries colourless.  Some children preferred to use a small brush or cotton bud for the glue while others enjoyed the sensation of using their fingers, and what fun they had in peeling the dried glue off their hands and fingers afterwards.

We explained to the children the idea was to position the objects close to each other, covering as much of the board as they could and boy they did a fantastic job!

Every body got involved and the result was absolutely beautiful. The children really enjoyed being part of a team and took great pride in what they had achieved together as a group. The mosaics are now on permanent display in our room.

Following the success of our mosaic project we invited to children to create a series of mosaic pavers.

You can see how we used the pavers in our ‘make it irresistible – with a hush garden‘ post on January 11th.