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!

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!