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!

As a follow up to our listening game we enclosed sand, rice, marbles and tanbark in polystyrene cups we had left over from our talking cups experiment.

We made two of each and as a group game we asked the children to use their ears to match up the pairs.

We made a chart to help them identify the mystery products.

Of course when you rattle them they feel different too, which helps. They did a very good job at finding the pairs.

Then it was their turn to make a ‘sound cup’.

We invited the children to make one each so later on they could shake it for their friends to guess what was inside.

Enclosing the cup used a bit of skill as they had to draw around the rim of the cup onto card,

cut it out …

then stick it thoroughly to the top of the cup …

so the inside bits couldn’t shake out.

At the end of the session those children with cups rattled them, one at a time, while everyone else listened.

They were pretty spot on most of the time with their guesses. It made it a bit tricky for all of us if they included more than ingredient in the cup however!

Parents often ask us how we can incorporate maths into a kindergarten program when some of the children are not interested in writing their own name, let alone learning about mathemathical concepts.

We have posted before about these wonderful maths tiles and spoken about how maths is all around us in children’s play.

Just look at the amazing patterns our children made last week …

all of this is wonder kindergarten maths!

Building with blocks is maths!

Measuring with blocks  …  maths!

Counting the blocks while measuring is maths!

Building the blocks to fit the ‘subject’  … that’s right  … maths!

Weights and scales is another way the children experiment with maths.

Just watch …

as our friend Olivia …

adds and subtract objects from the buckets …

until she makes the scales balance … maths!

Some kindergarten children are even ready to extend their maths skills further.

This is a game of snakes and ladders drawn up by one of our young friends.

Lots of sequencing of numbers  … 100 in all!

Now this my friends is how we can incorporate maths into a kindergarten program!