Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

As part of our chatting about the sea, we read the story of “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister. Most of the children are familiar with this series and really love  it. We pulled out a memory game which the children could enjoy playing in a small group.

There are many cards in the game, but as this is the first time we have done it together, we chose a small selection so it wouldn’t be too overwhelming. The children turn two cards over when it is their turn and try to make a pair. This is a great opportunity for many of them to become aware of the concept of taking it in turns in a particular order ie clockwise around the table.

They placed their pairs gleefully in front of themselves. We try avoid the “winning” thing and just feel pleased when someone finds a pair.

We let the children reset the game, encouraging them to spread the pairs around rather than next to each other.

After a couple of sessions of the children playing this in small groups, we have a go in the large group with a game called ”Tic tac toe”.

About 10 cards are spread out in the middle of the circle and one child uses a pointer, touching each card until the following song finishes.

Tic-tac-toe,

here I go,

where I land I do not know.

They turn that card over and try to remember where the matching pair is then pass the pointer onto another child. It’s a great game for small OR large groups.

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!

Following our Wild Action incursion, we enlarged some photos of the animals we saw.

We then laminated them and put a velcro dot on the back so we could use them on a felt board.

By adding Australian bush props, the children could make up their own scenarios.

The children then made their own animals …

… popped the dots on the back and used mini felt boards which we had obtained from Reverse Art.

We also used these animals for a “Who am I?” game.

One at a time the children would choose an animal and pop it on the felt board out of sight of the others. They then described the creatures features, such as, “I am cold blooded, I have scoot scales on my tail, I have 66 teeth etc … Who am I?”

The children were so great at this game. They clearly took in a lot of information during our Wild Action visit!

When our Pre-kinder children arrived …

… they replaced the Aussie animals with a bucketload of felt characters and farm animals …

… and had a great time creating their own stories and play scenarios.