Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Little pots of small interesting goodies such as beads, buttons, stones, corks etc…

… are just waiting to be popped onto the measuring scales to have their weights checked and compared.

We find adding the tweezers not only makes it more fun, but adds to the fine motor skill needed to accomplish the task.

The doll at the back in the chair is a prop to make the activity look more enticing, but of course, will probably become part of the play!

And there she goes!

Donna then brought along an old photo frame from home which has various compartments for different sized photos.

She took out the photos and glass and popped different coloured paper into each space with another selection of small bits and pieces.

Once again lots of wonderful fine motor activity …

and sorting took place.

More great play based learning!

As part of our chatting about the sea, we read the story of “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister. Most of the children are familiar with this series and really love  it. We pulled out a memory game which the children could enjoy playing in a small group.

There are many cards in the game, but as this is the first time we have done it together, we chose a small selection so it wouldn’t be too overwhelming. The children turn two cards over when it is their turn and try to make a pair. This is a great opportunity for many of them to become aware of the concept of taking it in turns in a particular order ie clockwise around the table.

They placed their pairs gleefully in front of themselves. We try avoid the “winning” thing and just feel pleased when someone finds a pair.

We let the children reset the game, encouraging them to spread the pairs around rather than next to each other.

After a couple of sessions of the children playing this in small groups, we have a go in the large group with a game called ”Tic tac toe”.

About 10 cards are spread out in the middle of the circle and one child uses a pointer, touching each card until the following song finishes.

Tic-tac-toe,

here I go,

where I land I do not know.

They turn that card over and try to remember where the matching pair is then pass the pointer onto another child. It’s a great game for small OR large groups.

At this early stage of the year, we seem to have a bit of a focus on colours, such as our colour matching game in one of our recent posts. A great large group game the children enjoy playing is called “This my spot”.

Each child sits behind a spot of their choice. We used four colours: red, blue green and yellow.

Together we hit our spots chanting,

“This is my spot, my spot, my spot.

This is my spot, my spot, my spot.”

Then repeat.

Simple, but fun and even our reluctant boys do this with gusto!

The teacher chooses a colour and the children with that spot stand up and do an action: green spots clapped hands three times .

Those children sit back down and we all chant the rhyme again. The next colour is chosen and the children with that spot stand up for their turn: yellow spots patted their head three times .

In between each colour we sit down and repeat the song: blue spots turned around three times .

This is repeated until all colours have been selected to do a different action: red spots did three star jumps!

We round it off by chanting one last time, then all colours are selected to stand up and put all actions together.

At the end of the game we sing the colours to be returned to the basket. Great colour recognition, counting, and turn taking.

::: make it irresistible

The children really enjoy repeating new songs and games, so as a follow up the next day when we played ‘this is my spot,’ as we selected colours to stand up, we invited one child from each colour group to choose the action their colour would do, as well as how many times they would do it. The children came up with some terrific actions – red spots did 4 star jumps, blue spots did 5 wiggles, green spots did 6 hand claps and yellow spots did 5 hand rolls.

The children take great pride in making simple decisions like choosing an action to perform and as we’ve often said before, they usually come up with the best ideas … after all … 5 wiggles … how devine is that!

Here we are at the beginning of the year again, with our eager students coming from three year old kinder into “big kinder”! It is lovely to see them again, and they seem so to have shot up over the Christmas break. We start them off in half groups for the first few sessions so they can reorientate themselves back into kinder mode and the new children to our center can get to know their new surroundings, friends and teachers in a relaxed manner.

We have set up lots of imaginary play areas …

and irresistible activities …

that are great for small groups of children.

When you have a hunt in your storeroom, it is surprising how many games you may have tucked away that you haven’t used for a long time for various reasons.

We found one when we were tidying up before Christmas which we hadn’t used in a while and thought it would be good adapted for one player, whereas in the past we have had it set up for more.

This time we put it on a small table and added a variety of different coloured pieces – the original discs, along with little owls from one bingo game and clowns from another.

They added a new element to the activity as the children could now mix and match the different items of corresponding colours.

We kept the dice from the original game, with colours on each face, so the children could use it to select the colours if they wanted to …

while others simply preferred the freedom to make their own choices.

Simple, quiet and engrossing, play based learning!

We all know how important fine motor construction is for childrens fine motor skills, but we find it is also great for their social skills.

We keep all of our construction materials in a set of lockers, where the children can access them at any time.

They are clearly marked with photos, so the children can identify the contents and know which tub to return the construction to when they have finished playing.

The children like nothing better than to bring boxes of construction down onto the mat to play with their friends.

We have learned through experience that if things aren’t in view of the children, chances are they won’t think about it…like they say “you can’t miss what you haven’t got”.  So if you’ve got it, let them know by making it available for them to choose when ever they please.

Children can’t have enough of this type of play… it’s physical, cognitive, social, fun, play based learning!

As you already know, we love the fact that in Australia we celebrate Christmas in the summer, so in order to enhance the Aussie Christmas feeling we have gone against tradition, and have a gum tree for a Christmas tree …

… and it just wouldn’t be an Aussie Christmas around here with out good ol’ paper chains hanging up around the place adding to all the festive cheer!

As we like to use recycled products in our program where ever possible, we opted to chop up old magazines, junk mail and advertising material to make our Christmas chains, and inter mixed with other brightly coloured paper …

… they look terrific.

Red and Blue group children ran a friendly competition to see which group could make the most chains.

Over several days the children poured into kinder keen to make their chains longer and longer!

Joining all those chains together proved to be a great fine motor activity for the children, and working out how to best attach the ends using sticky tape or staples, really had them thinking and experimenting …

… and bringing the ends together without twisting the paper, well that was a great challenge in itself!

It also proved to be a colourful maths activity when some of the children grouped the coloured strips together before adding them in patterns to the chains.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

We had some feedback from a Year 1 and 2 teacher at Stockdale Road Primary School in Traralgon about how her students still love play dough. One girl in particular is constantly drawn to it.

She also has a fascination with traffic lights so was supplied with red, yellow and green play dough.

She made four sets of traffic lights …

… and went onto arrange them into four groups of  three…

… and three groups of four.

We put out the same colours for our kindergarten children and they had a ball with it …

…  doing their own take on the activity.

You can imagine the colour it ended up being after a very short time.

What a great colour mixing activity.

We love hearing what our colleagues in primary school are doing with play based learning!!

When our children were creating hats with their grandparents just before Melbourne Cup Day, some made headpieces with antennaes and they said they were aliens.

The children loved it so after a discussion about what an alien looks like, we put out materials for more children to make alien head gear.

The only catch was we asked them to follow some simple instructions.  At this later stage of the year most children recognise their numbers up to 10 so they didn’t need verbal instruction.

We left the creative side up to them and the results were as different as each child! It was interesting to see how the children interpreted the instructions. Some read it as; 1 feather, 2 straws, 3 pop sticks, 4 patty pans and 5 sticker dots, while other interpreted it as 5 single objects.

We staged a fashion parade, then popped on a song;

“Little Purple Alien” by Scott Browne …

… and away they went, dancing and bopping to the the great music!

The next time we played the song (we have found the children love to hear, sing and move to the same music time and time again), we gave them some different props which gave it a new angle.

They had to figure out the left hand gloves from the right hand gloves but once that was sorted they could hold the props and move them to the music how ever they liked.

They made very cute one eyed purple aliens!

As the children continue to be interested in purple aliens we pulled out the salt ceramics (see our post on salt ceramic chickens post on October 16th for the recipe) …

…  and again, the resulting models were widely varied.

A few days later the children collected some styrofoam balls and coloured pom-poms from the invention table …

… and created different alien creature …

… sooooooo cute!

At this later time of year we like to hold an open day at kinder for special people in the children’s lives. These usually tend to be their grandparents, but can be anyone they would like to invite to come. We ask the children to sign and decorate invitations which they then place into stamped addressed envelopes and pop into our kinder post box, and then we post them in the official post box.

Perhaps due to us using the telephone and internet so much, we have found that many children are not familiar with how to fold the paper to fit into the envelope.

We saw many interesting variations!

What a lot of maths was used – which is biggest, what shape are they both, how are you going to make the letter fit into the envelope, how many folds do you need to make etc …

Also great fine motor skills were needed to do all that folding, placing into the envelope and sealing.

Some struggled to actually seal the envelope, not being aware if they needed to lick it, just flip the top over or pull off the strip of paper then put it together.

Even fairly basic activities are an adventure!

Children love games they can play with each other, especially simple games which don’t require assistance from an adult.

“What’s missing” is a memory game which can be altered to suit different age groups.

Select a number of varied items, place them on a tray and have the children take a good look at what is there.  It will help if you describe each item as well as count them, so the children are clear on what, and how many items there are. Then cover the items with a cloth and have the children close their eyes while one is removed from the tray.

We like to sing this little rhyme so the children know it’s time to close their eyes

Heads down!          Eyes closed!          Nooooo peaking!

Once the item has been removed the children open their eyes to look and see what is missing.

Depending on the capabilities of the children you can add more items and work up to removing several in one go.

We find that a maximum of ten items for our kinder children is ideal but older children will soon let you know how far they want to go.

This is a great visual and memory game the children can play amongst themselves without adult help.  How wonderful!