Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

As a follow up to the book ‘Clever Sticks‘ we read last week …

we thought the children would enjoy cooking up some fried rice and have the opportunity to eat a delicious meal with chop sticks.

We gave them knives to chop up some carrot, celery and bacon.

Using knives is not new to our children as we do a lot of cooking at kinder.

However cooking in the fry pan was something the children had not experienced with us before so they all lined up to have a go at stirring the rice.

Most of it even stayed in the the pan!

Using chopsticks to move cotton balls around like they did last week was certainly a different experience to actually attempting to eat with them.

Some children came up with very interesting techniques to get the food into their mouths …

while others coped with the chop stick action amazingly well!

Not surprisingly though, when Sherry arrived at the table bearing spoons and forks many of the children were very quick to accept here offer of help!

While a large number of children did give into the cutlery …

a handful stuck the chop stick challenge out to the end … so impressive!

We always have a healthy supply of salt on hand at kinder as we use it for our playdough and salt ceramic recipes.

This week we raided our salt bucket and popped it into our large sensory tub for the children to have a play. (Later we will recycle it back into the bucket for other uses)

We offered the children a selection of items  …

for them to scoop …

and measure.

Pour …

funnel …

and investigate with.

Then again you need no tools at all to write and draw in the salt.

They really enjoyed the sensory experience of sifting the salt through their fingers … and pouring it up their sleeves!

It was interesting to listen to the children discussing in great depth whether or not it was in fact salt … OR was it sugar?!

It was our delightful friend Hannah, as she drew pictures in the tub, who used her senses to conclude it was indeed salt but she did not taste it …

“Listen” she said, “Feel this … I can smell it … it sounds like salt!”

Hee hee hee … Good on you Hannah!

Anyone living in Melbourne at the moment will agree with us that we have been experiencing a heap of rain – wonderful, but a bit of a novelty for us here in our drought stricken land. Anyway, that results in a lot more time indoors than we would usually have which means we have more opportunity to do some great large group games.

Louise from Ouyen kindergarten inspired us here with this feather game. We stuck some feathers onto a stick, gave each child a carpet square and had them all scrunch up into a ball on the blue semicircle mat … no peeking!

One child tickled another with the feathers, then handed the feathered stick over to them before sitting down quietly on our green semicircle mat away from the group a little.

The tickled child then has a turn, and so on until all children have been tickled.

It was lovely to see the children’s faces when they joined the tickled group.

It was like a bit of a conspiracy seeing who the last child would be.

What a lovely relaxing game to play on a cold winter’s day. Thanks Louise for the idea.