Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Anyone living in Melbourne at the moment will agree with us that we have been experiencing a heap of rain – wonderful, but a bit of a novelty for us here in our drought stricken land. Anyway, that results in a lot more time indoors than we would usually have which means we have more opportunity to do some great large group games.

Louise from Ouyen kindergarten inspired us here with this feather game. We stuck some feathers onto a stick, gave each child a carpet square and had them all scrunch up into a ball on the blue semicircle mat … no peeking!

One child tickled another with the feathers, then handed the feathered stick over to them before sitting down quietly on our green semicircle mat away from the group a little.

The tickled child then has a turn, and so on until all children have been tickled.

It was lovely to see the children’s faces when they joined the tickled group.

It was like a bit of a conspiracy seeing who the last child would be.

What a lovely relaxing game to play on a cold winter’s day. Thanks Louise for the idea.

Our children seem to love any game which includes a ball …

We have two netball rings at slightly different heights  …

so the children have a better chance of getting the balls through the hoop.

We have a tennis ball on a sock to hit with racquets.

as well as the big swinging ball you may have seen in our pendulum post …

and the big punching ball for the children to push, hit or even kick to each other.

At this time of year …

there are soccer games …

and constant football, Aussie Rules footy that is, happening down on the grass.

We are trying very hard to get across the concept of kick to kick, but it is hard for four and five year old boys who are full of energy not to tackle.

They are doing their best though!

Then there’s always cricket.  There’s no tackling in the gentlemen’s sport of cricket!

When the children are coming inside after outdoor play, we like to line them up and use a variety of ball activities in order to assist their ball handling capabilities.

We either bounce the ball to them …

and they do the same back to us.

Roll the ball to…

and fro …

or throw and catch the ball.

We like our children to handle balls of all different shapes and sizes …

as well as throwing and catching beanbags …

to challenge them as much as we can.  We are finding that everyone’s skills are improving rapidly even those children whose natural inclination is shy away from a thrown object!

Ball sports have so many positives, being great for the children’s hand eye coordination, balance, language, turn taking, patience, team building, cooperation, muscle development, friendships etc, etc,  We especially love that now the children are that bit older, while sometimes disagreeing with the umpires decision, have come to accept it. Our friend Dante likes to remind the children …  ”My dad says don’t argue with the umpire … he’s the boss … and anyway that happens in footy!”   They really have come along way in six months of kinder!

During one particularly wet morning while we couldn’t get outside, we felt the need to redirect a group of children who just wanted out!

We had some long cardboard cylinders one of the mums had brought in, so encouraged the children to put a tunnel course together to see if the cars, trains and balls would travel down.

The children had a great time joining them in various configurations and lifting them to different heights to see if objects would zoomed down them (or not!).

Sometimes objects got stuck on the way …

so they soon figured out that measuring size was important.

This activity kept them occupied and engaged for so long …

that they were in no hurry to go outside once the rain stopped.

We witnessed wonderful turn taking …

cooperation ..

and team work in action.

A few days later a couple of the children were standing at the top of the slope in our playground with hoops and decided to see how fast they would roll down and how far they would go. …

Then they tried the same experiment going down as well as up the slide!

They also grabbed some large balls and did the same with them for a while until one child suggested putting a basket at the bottom of the slide and trying to get the balls to land in it.

It was harder than it looked and needed quite a bit of judgement. We heard lots of great maths language:

“I’ll go first, you go second.”

“Roll the ball down. Now roll it up!”

“Put the basket closer.”

“Push it back a bit.”

“Try the small ball then the big one.”

“I won – you came last.”

Math’s and science is all around us. It doesn’t have to be complex we simply need to open our eyes and ears to discover it’s there!