Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Here in Melbourne it is Fathers’ Day on the first Sunday in September. We are not inclined to make a big fuss about presents and cards, but we nearly always like to do a ‘why I love my Dad’ thing, similar to what we did for the mums earlier in the year.

Again we were given an idea from one of the children – they are so good, aren’t they?

Charlotte gave us this picture to hang up.

She cut out clothes from ribbon, taped it onto a piece of paper, then drew the head, arms and feet with black pencil.

We thought it looked great and would be a different way for the children to create pictures of their dads. We slightly adapted what Charlotte had done by offering the children a selection of plain and patterned paper and left them to come up with some great ideas.

Some children carefully drew the clothes on the coloured paper first, before cutting them out and pasting them to white paper.

Some careful informal measuring also took place so that the tops fitted the bottoms.

Others of course were not so fussy.

Many of them included themselves in the picture too and regardless of the way they were made each one was as unique as it was beautiful!

The children then dictated a story, to our student Nikki, about why they love their dads which was typed up, printed out and pasted onto their beautiful pictures.

Then the old favourite once more …

laminating the finished product.

Simple but effective. We hope the dads like them.

Thanks for the irresistible idea Charlotte!

We seemed to have collected an awful lot of egg cartons lately! Some we used to make our mini beasts but we still seem to have bags full of them in our storeroom.

Last week we popped a big pile for our young pre-kinder friends to have a play with.

We added some glue sticks and scrap booking paper …

along with lots of different coloured sticky dots …

and our pre-kinder children’s favourites … mini patty pans!

Our young friends had the best fun creating together!

And what dexterous little creations they made too.

What a terrific fine motor exercise this proved to be with such great focus shown by our three and four year olds!

Following Jackson’s suggestion when admiring our painted sticks, we gathered up some goodies for the children to make wind chimes. Our yard is going to look fabulous!

We already had some utensils with holes in them from past activities and added electric wire covers, beads, small bells, foil cases, sticks, wooden beads etc… really anything that could be threaded and could cope with being outside in the wind.

One of the lovely parishioners from the church brought us a box of wood offcuts, so out came the trusty drill.

While we were at it, we thought the children may as well drill holes into other things such as gumnuts and sticks.

We didn’t offer the children needles this time …

preffering them to have a go using their fingers to thread with fishing line …

which proved to be another great fine motor challenge!

Our children love any threading activity and are always engaged here for long periods of time.

Gone are the days when the children want to take everything they make home. Now they love the idea of putting their creations into group displays.

We hung our windchimes from our sunblinds just outside the door …

this way we can lower …

and raise them to catch the wind!

We so love it when the children come up with such irresistible ideas.

Good on you Jackson!