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!

Quite a few of our families are heading off for holidays at the moment, mostly to sunny spots such as Fiji or Queensland. As the children’s interest in snails hasn’t waned, we asked them what sort of holiday a snail would have considering they move so slowly. The sorts of ideas the children came up with were “The next plant” or “The next door neighbours”.

We asked them to think about what sort of holiday they would like to go on if they were snails and they came up with some great destination ideas like; the moon, the supermarket, Queensland, Fairyland, the beach, the footy and the city!

They drew their snails, …

… some drew their holiday destination too.

Then an adult wrote the holiday story out for them …

… if they couldn’t do it themselves.

One child who wrote his own said, “I wanted my snail to go to the circus, but I didn’t know the word. Then I thought he could go to church, but I didn’t know the word, so he is going to the farm because I DID know that word!“

At the end of each session the children read out their own stories to the others.

Then we made their stories into books …

…  for everyone to enjoy.

Collective nouns can be beautiful and evocative, even poetic!

Like the collective noun for snails …

… ‘an ascargatoire’ of snails!  How magnificent is that?!

Then there is also a rout of snails and a walk of snails

Here’s an nice, simple poem we taught the children about snails.

If you get excited about collective nouns like we do, or simply enjoy learning new and interesting language, visit our ‘collective nouns’ link, and like us you may just discover a whole new language!