Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Although our term holidays have now started, a week before Easter, we wanted to enjoy an Easter cooking activity for our last day.

Often we have made proper hot cross buns with the children but found ourselves running out of time so we decided to compromise and use a scone mixture.

We still had the cooking, science, sharing and taking turns experience but without all the fuss.

We just made sweet fruit hot cross scones instead …

The children even added a cross on top …

by squeezing a flour and water mixture out through a small hole in a zip lock bag …

And they turned out just fine!

As our weather in Melbourne is still warm and sunny, we were able to sit outside and enjoy the fruits of our labours.

And they were YUM!

We asked the parents to send along a hard boiled egg for the children to decorate in the lead up to Easter.

First we talked about how wax crayon resists dye and let the children have a practice drawing on card with crayon which was then painted over with dye (food colouring in water).

The boys in particular loved this activity, even those that we don’t usually see anywhere near a writing implement.

By using a white crayon to write or draw on the white card the boys noticed something “magic” happened!

They could write in secret and uncover their message with the coloured water! We think the use of the word “magic” may have had some bearing on this enthusiasm!

Next, they drew on their eggs  …

then dunked them into a bowl of dye.

The children were interested to see the crayon on the egg shell resisted the same way it did on the card … some doubted this would happen.

The results were simple but effective and the lovely thing is they can then be taken home and eaten, so no food is wasted.

We never fail to get excited at the way science and creative fun compliment each other so well!

With Easter fast approaching we thought we had better pull out some appropriate songs, rhymes and movement activities. The children all know “If you’re happy and you know it”, so we just adapted it to:

If you like the Easter bunny hop, hop, hop.

If you like the Easter bunny hop, hop, hop.

If you like the Easter bunny and you think he’s really funny,

If you like the Easter bunny hop, hop, hop.

The children used their hands as ears and someone suggested we make some rabbit ears (bless them!).

We got out strips of paper, card for the ears, drawing implements, scissors, sticky tape, glue sticks and staplers.

It provided another great opportunity to practice our cutting, sticky tape and stapling skills!

We ended up with a large assortment of very interesting and unique looking rabbits.

Wearing our rabbit ears, we sang the song again at the end of the session.

The children then came up with their own action ideas so we added more verses:

If you like the Easter bunny wiggle your tail

and

If you like the Easter bunny give out eggs

They really enjoyed such a simple activity and most of it came from them!

A couple of other Easter songs we enjoyed were -

“Little Easter Rabbit”

Sung to the familiar tune of “Little Peter Rabbit had a fly upon his nose”

“Five Little Easter Eggs”

This is a simple finger play rhyme or you can do it our way and use five children to represent the eggs …

and we all know how much children love to act things out!

In this one the children bob down once their coloured egg has been eaten.

Simple fun play based learning!