We have been discussing Treasure Baskets lately on our Facebook page and thought we would put together some for our littlies as they are ideal to help enable them to explore their world. We found these photos here. Pretty well anything can go into these baskets but preferably nothing made from plastic.

We have some beautiful suede hearts given to us by one of our kinder children a few years ago. They feel very tactile with the soft smooth material and cute little knobbly glass beads sewn onto them.

We decided to introduce these first, simply nestled together on a beautiful piece of wood just to see what the children would do with them. Gradually we will include additional objects.

The girls felt them and shared them.

They took them off the wood and put them back on.

They counted them with our help …

and they posted them into their pockets!!

Quite a challenge for little fingers and tight pockets!

Then retrieved them again … Woohoo!!!

How wonderfully simple and versatile is this type of open ended play for babies and toddlers!

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!

Among the treasures we scrounge up from our favourite recycling place are wooden blocks which appear to be left overs from furniture making.

The bigger children use them for a variety of things, particularly in their imaginative play, so we like to have a basket of them available for whenever they want to use them.

Interestingly enough, recently when we had the littlies over and they were attracted to this basket of goodies too.

They make wonderful building blocks.

Made from pine …

 a relatively soft and light weight timber …

they are fat and stable but different, interesting shapes, which makes the job a bit more of a challenge than the regular cube-shaped blocks. …

 light enough for the children to handle …

and knock down …

without hurting each other.

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.

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 have noticed that children love treasure boxes and baskets and will play for ages with these exciting but simple props.

Our children lately have been playing with the button basket and the bead container.

We pulled out the jewelery box recently for a young girl while we were waiting for our friends to arrive.

She had the best time, not only placing jewelery on herself…

but draping and arranging it for nearly half an hour …

over a book stand …

which had lots of curly bits on it.

We think she enjoyed just as much carefully rearranging everything back into their correct spots …

in the very special box (with a latch!).

One of the wonderful things about play based learning (amongst many others) is that opportunities for literacy and numeracy pop up all the time. All we need to do is to recognise the moment and take advantage of it.

At Ellie V.Preschool, when we were visiting recently, a boy was playing with a magnetic fishing game. Usually the children like to count how many fish each of them have caught, a wonderful numeracy activity in itself.

This child however was checking out the numbers on the back of each fish.

We encouraged him to turn them over and count the dots on the other side to see if the number and dots matched.

From then on each time he caught a fish he checked that the numbers were the same as the dots.

He had a laugh when we talked about the weights that had the number 1,000 on them – “NO WAY! You can’t fit THAT many dots on there!” he said!

Play is such an irresistible way to introduce our preschooler to maths!

With our singing lately of BINGO, JESUS and SANTA, we have found that the children are quite interested in how words are spelled and how many letters are in them. Of course if they have five letters in them we can sing them to the BINGO tune! What a lot of fun we have been having!

They have also been noticing that the word ‘Christmas’ is in the title of many of the stories we are reading at the moment, and having talked about how it is spelled we decided to put up a Christmas sign.

We wrote the outlines, including the year, onto strips of white canvas.

The children’s job was to decorate the letters with the Poscas they used …

on their Memory Books.

The one rule we gave them was that they had to draw within the lines.

We are finding that they are loving having a rule or two (although they are good at disregarding the ‘clean up after yourself’ rule!).

It was another group project which they enjoyed doing together then admiring the results of their work.

Their sign looks great and very welcoming hanging up at the end of our room.

At our Christmas Carols Concert tonight our children will be singing a selection of Christmas songs, one of which is called “10 little angels”.

In order to include everyone in the performance we have run off our ever popular song cards. One to represent each of the ten angels.

Ten children are given an angel card …

and one by one, as we go through the song they hold up their card …

Children without a card …

count the number of angels on their fingers as we sing.

Through the chorus the angel card holders wave the cards back and forth …

while the rest of the children take up their instruments and play.

Our version of the song goes like this …

(One by one the children raise the angel cards as we sing.)

There was 1, there were 2, there were 3 little angels.

There were 4, there were 5, there were 6 little angels.

There were 7, there were 8, there were 9 little angels.

10 little angels in the band!

(The children pick up their instruments and play)

Oh wasn’t that a band on Christmas morning,

Christmas morning,

Christmas morning.

Oh wasn’t that a band on Christmas morning,

Christmas morning soon!

You can listen to the tune here if you like!

We love that this song is another great opportunity to reinforce the children’s numeracy skills.

When the cards are handed out …

it is up to the children to assemble themselves into the correct numerical order …

something they do extremely well at this time of year!

Like everyone, we have a delightful bunch of boys who have way too much energy! They love to be very active playing footy, soccer, volleyball etc…

Sometimes they just want to run, which is fine but at times can be a bit aimless and can get a little silly, so that’s where we teachers step in and head them in a more purposeful direction.

As we all know, boys LOVE a competition, so races are perfect for them – using their energy for a reason!

We have a container of flour which we use for marking the grass for such things as the footy goals, or in this case, the start and finish lines for races.

One beautiful, sunny Spring day last week out came the flour and the races were on – running, hopping, going backwards etc…

Two boys were the starters and the judges – throwing up their hands to declare the winner – a very important and powerful job!

After a while the boys brought out the wheelbarrows …

and added blocks for a bit more of a challenge …

and if that wasn’t challenge enough …

there were always the ‘bucket stilts’ to race on!

Then we introduced them to three legged races using elastic to hold their middle legs together.

They had a ball and soon mastered the concept of working together to get the most efficient way of walking …

then running.

Great team work and also incidental maths concepts happened – inside, outside, together, three …