Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

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!

We just can’t seem to get enough of marbles at the moment!

We had a big shallow box including its lid in the storeroom needing to be used in some fashion, so following on from our marble run fun outside and with a bit of a hit from Teacher Tom and his ‘homemade pinball machine‘ we thought it would be fun to make a couple of portable pinball/marble mazes inside the boxes.

With a bit of direction from Donna, the children Blu Tacked pieces of dowelling, cones, cylinders, corks, bottles tops and bits and pieces sourced from the invention table onto this great box.

Then, as a team, they popped in a marble (or marbles) and moved the box up and down and round about trying to get the marble to follow a trail, preferably through the tunnels.

And they did … over and over again!

We invited the children to bring along some shoe boxes to kinder as they are firm and strong so they could make their own mini versions to take home.

By using Blu Tack to adhere the bits and pieces, the children are able to move the parts around to alter the marbles path, adding an extra dimension to their new game.

They loved it!

With all the Blu Tack Jarvis used that marble wasn’t going anywhere!

The children created their own unique designs …

and we saw some very unusual ones too.

But none quite as inspiring as our young friend Clives …

who even made his own ‘shoe box’!

We seemed to have a pile of polystyrene cups in the storeroom left over from some social do, so decided we’d utilise them for a science experiment.

We had been talking a bit about how noise comes from vibrations (musical straws) and how echoing enhances noise (echo chamber), so thought we could combine the two.

The children poked a hole in the bottom of the cup with a small piece of pipe cleaner .

Next, with a little help they attached some string to the pipe cleaner and

threaded it up through the cup, through the hole and pulled it to fit snugly.

All they needed to do then to make their cups ‘talk’ was to dampen their fingers and jerk them down the string!  The children thought it sounded a bit like a chicken clucking!

This action would create some noise without the cup, but it would be very quiet - the cup echo chamber enhances the vibrations enough for us to hear it easily!