Irresistible Ideas for play based learning

You have probably noticed that we like ooey gooey stuff at our kinder.

We wanted to move on from the goop and decided “gack” was the way to go.

Again we headed to Science Bob. He calls his slime, but we call soap flakes with water slime, so called ours gack.

Once again we wrote up a simple recipe for the children to follow.

1 scoop of PVA glue

mixed with 1 scoop of water.

Then add food colouring

and mix in 1 scoop of liquid starch …

then MIX, MIX, MIX!

It becomes beautifully blobby and improves with handling.

Make sure you use good quality liquid starch (fabulon’ ironing aide is good) as when Sherry tried to economise on a home brand product, the experiment was a flop!!

But when we got it right …

oh …

what …

fun …

we …

had!

Easel painting is an activity we offer to our children every day.

A great way to extend the activity is to include a selection of items which the children can can use to decorate their pictures to enhance the overall experience.

We added PVA glue to the paint pots and provide things like feathers, patty pans, cotton balls, cards and scissors.

By supplying recycled cards, in this case we provided Easter cards, something wonderful and unexpected happened. One child wanted to know what the writing on the card said which created a lot of interest amongst the other children.

Donna needed to hover by the easel all morning in able to help the children ‘read’ what the cards said. This resulted in the children assembling letters within their pictures … so great for literacy!

By providing scissors with the activity the children were encouraged to cut up the words and pictures.

While some children’s scissors skills are excellent, many still struggle to handle them correctly, so this proved to be a great opportunity for them.

Some children simply used the paint as a way of gluing things to the paper …

while others painted and pasted with the paint …

and a few even took the black texta and drew their picture before  painting …

It proved to be a great way to attract to the easle those children who so often pass it by … and we’re sure you’ll agree that is always to be encouraged!

Another very popular activity with varied and individual results!

We decided a number of years ago that it would be nice to have the children create group projects we could display for everybody to enjoy.

Once, after we had read the delightful story of elmer by David McKee the children began creating beautiful patchwork pictures by cutting up squares of brightly coloured paper and pasting them to pictures they had drawn themselves.  This gave us the idea of having the children create a group mosaic picture for display, so we introduce them to the basics of mosaic art.

We have lots of bits and pieces in tubs we have collected over the years so the children set out to gather up objects to use for our project. Sorting through everything was great for their fine motor skills as they found items like corks, bottle tops, tiles and glass stones as well as some very tiny beads, buttons and sequins.

We had two pieces of ‘mdf’ given to us by one of our crafty mums which was perfect for the project. We used PVA glue to stick the decorations onto the timber as it is strong and dries colourless.  Some children preferred to use a small brush or cotton bud for the glue while others enjoyed the sensation of using their fingers, and what fun they had in peeling the dried glue off their hands and fingers afterwards.

We explained to the children the idea was to position the objects close to each other, covering as much of the board as they could and boy they did a fantastic job!

Every body got involved and the result was absolutely beautiful. The children really enjoyed being part of a team and took great pride in what they had achieved together as a group. The mosaics are now on permanent display in our room.

Following the success of our mosaic project we invited to children to create a series of mosaic pavers.

You can see how we used the pavers in our ‘make it irresistible – with a hush garden‘ post on January 11th.