Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

Our children’s most popular board games is Snail’s Pace Race. It’s one of those great games that requires no adult explanation, intervention, supervision or interruption! 

It’s a very easy game which the children can play on their own,

with one friend …

or in a group. 

It has a dice with colours corresponding to the colours of the snails.

Sometimes the children choose a snail which becomes theirs to race while at other times they move the snail corresponding to the colour they throw on the dice.

We like to encourage them to set the rules before they start playing!

To keep the game interesting, we provide the children with a selection of different objects they can use, which correspond to the colours on the board.

You’d be amazed at what you can find inside other games in your store room to mix and match!

The children could make their own game by drawing or ruling segmented columns on a piece of paper. In fact you could even make a giant sized version of it on a long piece of paper and the children can be the ‘snails’ … Or draw it in chalk on the concrete outside … Hmmm  … haven’t tried those ideas ourselves yet … but we definitely will!

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!