We can’t resist a challenge, and when we had the opportunity to have fun in the DOT MAD challenge, with our U.K. friend and freelance play consultant Marc Armitage, well we were there with bells on!

We needed to find something white ….

and we were lucky enough to find an abandoned basin.

Then we needed some spots and …

some children and we were away!

There was a lot a talk between about who should stick where and what patterns they wanted to make.

They made round shapes …

and lines.

It was a fabulous fine motor activity, creative, caused lots of discussion and involved good solid team work.

The big children finally let the littlies have a go near the end …

and they loved joining in too!

We ran out of stickers eventually, but we reckon the finished product is pretty fantastic – well done guys!!!

Are YOU up for the challenge?

Using books as a starter for creative ideas is a fabulous tool for teachers.

Ruth Bode, art and sustainability teacher from Croydon West Primary School used Shaun Tan’s books as an inspiration for her year 3 and 4 children.

Shaun Tan is an Australian author and illustrator from Perth in Western Australia and his illustrations are a wonderful starting off point for children as they are so quirky and outside the square.

The Lost Thing is a humorous story about a boy who discovers a bizarre-looking creature while out collecting bottle-tops at a beach. Having guessed that it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but the problem is met with indifference by everyone else, who barely notice its presence. Each is unhelpful in their own way; strangers, friends, parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life. In spite of his better judgement, the boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs.

“The Lost Thing” was the starting point for these pen and water colour illustrations.

We need to be able to take the pressure off ourselves and pull on many resources to get the creative juices of our students going. We don’t always have to rely solely on ourselves – there are many gorgeous picture books, story boooks, posters, movies, photos etc… etc… available for us to call on.

How spectacular are these drawings? We need to keep in mind that these young artists are only 8 and 9 years old!!

How proud these children must be of their achievements – we know that we are!!!

It is surprising how at quite a young age, many children like to try jigsaw puzzles.

We had two littlies over and the older of the two pulled out some very simple puzzles – graded circles …

and graded pigs.

It involved not only lots of fine motor work and lots of thinking …

but also heaps of talking about size like big, small, bigger, smaller, biggest, smallest …

and shapes such as round, circle and pig as well as positional language such as in, out and next to.

Her little cousin was watching her very carefully and wanted to have a go too.

Even though she didn’t have the skill of the older child, she tried very hard.

The beautiful thing that happened was that when she struggled, our little experienced possum helped her get the pieces in.

Such wonderful cooperation from two very young children.

This is a great example of why age groups should be mixed in our childcare centres …

 just like they are in families …

 rather than segregating them into their year levels.

We find that the children often want to revisit tattooed rocks. They just love doing it!

They tattooed some quite big ones recently and started playing games with them.

We were at Donna’s house where there is a staircase and they wanted to play a game incorporating the stairs – probably just an excuse to go up and down them!

We found some counters, wrote the numbers 1, 2 and 3 on them and popped them into a bag.

The children reached in, pulled out a counter and decided that whatever the number was …

that was how many stairs the rocks could go up …

until all the stairs had a rock on them.

The best part of the game was, all the rules were made up by them!

When they came back down the other way, whatever the number was, was how many rocks were put back into the bowl at the bottom.

Making up their own rules meant they could change them as they went along, but everyone was happy, including we adults who loved the number recognition and one to one correspondence which occurred naturally in their play.

Following on from this made up game the children pulled out a board game which we had picked up on a recent visit to Resource Rescue, but we hadn’t yet got around to reading the rules.

Once again though, they said they didn’t need the rules …

“We just want to play!”

Now we reckon there’s a lesson in that little statement for all of us!

We talked about how younger children like to post things in Toddler Posties.

Another activity they enjoy is sorting. We had some blue plastic shapes that we had picked up from Resource Rescue and had just popped them into a basket for the children to do whatever they liked with them.

We also like to have a variety of boxes for imaginative and creative play. Our two year old picked out an egg carton and started plopping the blue balls into the holes in the carton.

She only wanted to use the balls …

and although there was a left over space …

and she thought all the balls were gone, she still did not want to put in a cube or triangle shape.

Then she found one last ball hiding under the other shapes – WOOHOO! …

and very happily popped it into the last hole.

Then along came the one year old who doesn’t have the same sense of “sameness” or “oneness” that her older cousin has …

and just piled everything in regardless of its shape.

It is so interesting to see how quickly our children mature and develop and to watch how they use the same materials in very different ways!

The same activity, different outcomes …

but a great example of an open ended developmental learning experience they could both share.

When we were teaching at St John’s we had a special bear called (very originally!) Weekend Bear. He (or she – it was unisex) went home with a different child each week for about four days over the weekend. On their first day back at kinder after the weekend the child would share their story of the fun that the whole family had had with Weekend Bear. They may have included a story dictated by this child, a drawing of some of the things they did together and /or photos.

At Kallista Preschool they have a funny old clown called Bob. He goes home for the whole week with each child. The teachers very sensibly include a book of many activities, so if the children can’t think of what to do, they can just look up something in the book.

When Bob came to visit Sherry with her very excited grandson, he decided that it would be fun to make biscuits with Bob, so we checked out the recipe section and found one we thought Bob could manage (with a little help).

We gathered up all the ingredients and Bob chose the cutters.

There was a lot of weighing …

then mixing …

rolling out …

and cutting, all under Bob’s watchful eye.

Then it was clean up time. Bob is a good superviser and he did his best to help too!

He was pretty impressed by the resulting delicious biscuits which emerged from the oven. Thanks for visiting us Bob – have fun at your next holiday away from kinder.

We were checking out the Youtube video again of P-p-p-p-platypus with the children, which they just love …

when one of them noticed The Duck Song and asked if we could play it.

We chatted about the idea of a lemonade stand and where lemonade comes from. They didn’t realise that we can make some really delicious lemonade ourselves – we don’t have to go to the shop to buy some!

Fortunately it is lemon season at the moment and Donna’s tree is full to overflowing with fat juicy lemons.

We headed out into the drizzly rain and collected a bowl full of beautiful yellow lemons which smelled just divine.

We remembered that Jenny from Let the Children Play made lemonade a while back with her children so we had a quick look at her recipe and adapted it to suit our small number of children - two! Nothing too precise …

in fact we just made it up to taste as we went along.

The children squeezed six lemons in this fantastic press.

It needed some good teamwork to get all the juice out!

We used tap water but you could use carbonated water if you want the bubbles. We added two scoops (or there abouts) of regular sugar, as we didn’t have any caster sugar. Told you we were making it up!

And by scoops we’re talking laundry powder scoops!!!

Using a whisk they stirred vigorously.

In with the freshly squeezed lemon juice,

 and another good whisk …

before popping it into a nice crystal jug.

Then it was a case of pour and drink – irresistible indeed!!!

A while back we posted about an I spy bottle the children made using recycled materials …

and a wiggly green worm.

The staff at Kurboroo kindergarten were inspired by this post and came up with an I spy version of their own, burying objects in large glass jars full of rice.

As an extension to our I spy bottle, they photographed each object before they placed it in the jar.

Then they made up picture cards matching the contents of the jars …

and challenged the children to find and match the items.

It was a lovely game  …

and the children relished the challenge.

Considering this group of children were from the pre-kinder group …

we were extremely impressed with their ability to find and match the objects!

We had never really thought all that much about the history of pockets, but we were fascinated by the lesson that Ruth Bode, art and sustainability teacher from Croydon West Primary School gave us while we were visiting recently.

Ruth told us that pockets weren’t originally part of a jacket, pants, skirt etc … but rather were a separate piece of clothing which was hung from a belt.

Over time of course they became incorporated into our clothing as people’s goods were way too easy to steal when stored like this. It is a tad more convenient as well!

A project Ruth gave her children in the junior classes was to design and create their own pockets out of clay using items from nature to create patterns on the front.

While the children are really lucky that the school has its own kiln for firing their clay creations …

you could also make similar art using air dried clay …

like our children did last year, when they made jewelry.

Every pocket was as different as the children.

image from - Demetria Chappo

What a great concept (and history lesson at the same time!)

Oh joy – sand and water!!! The children were having fun outside with sand and sticks (naturally) and we suggested they could perhaps wet the sand and write their names or draw in it.

We gave them a squirter bottle each filled with water to dampen down the sand.

Well they started off wetting the sand, then the fun of the squirter bottles took over!

The path was watered and the ants were given a drink (lucky them).

The walls were cleaned …

and the plants were drenched.

They did eventually head back to the sand …

and were interested to discover that only the top layer was wet when they started to draw in it.

Hmmm, sand does need a lot of water …

to get all the way through!