Learning Play | learning 4 kids

Hidden Shapes in the Salt Tray

Posted by Janice on January 6, 2013 19 Comments

What shapes can you find in the salt tray? They are hidden under the salt; use your paint brush to sift through the salt to see if you can find them….

Hiding black paper shapes in our homemade Rainbow Salt Tray and searching for them is a fun, engaging and motivating activity for kids to learn about their shapes.

What you will need?

For this activity we have re-used our Rainbow Salt Tray from a previous activity and added black paper cut out shapes.

Firstly I removed all the salt from the tray and sticky taped 6 main shapes we have been learning onto the rainbow paper. Then I added the salt back into the tray again. You will also need a paint brush for this activity.

Before starting this activity Miss 2 and I read the book Play Shapes by Begin Smart Books, which is a board/foam book that has removable shapes much like puzzle pieces that are used to match the shapes on different pages. You can see the black circle in the middle picture is matched to the circles to the ladybug, it inserts into place.

Let’s Play

This was such an exciting play opportunity to learn about shapes for Miss 2 as she sifted with the paint brush through the salt to find the hidden shapes. The concentration on her face was priceless as she tried to control the stokes with the paint brush. Miss 2 also tried different techniques for moving the salt around the tray, some were more fast circular sifting strokes and others were long and slow strokes but she had every success in finding the shapes.

Miss 2 loves to copy and repeat words that I say at the moment so this was a great opportunity to continue to encourage this and say the names of the shapes she found. It is also a great opportunity to count how many sides and corners some of the shapes have.

Learning Opportunities

Creativity
Fine Motor Development – Pre-writing skills
Hand-Eye Coordination and Control
Cause and Effect
Concentration
Spatial awareness – experimenting with shape and space
Language development – shape names

Find more shape activities & other ideas…..

Exploring Shapes

Rainbow Salt Tray

Animal Rice Art – It’s Colourful magic!

Posted by Penny on November 20, 2012 7 Comments

Today I feel incredibly privileged to share a guest post with you written by a lovely blogging friend of mine, Penny from Wildlife Fun 4 Kids. Be sure to visit her fabulous website where you will find so many inspiring ideas, fun activities for kids and so much more!

Children love to touch, they love to play and they especially love magic. This activity extends on one of the activities created here at Learning 4 Kids. It doesn’t take much to prepare but can give your children hours of magical fun (while they learn)!

We are avid followers of Learning 4 Kids. I can’t help getting excited about the activities Janice creates with her children because I know my girls will love each and every one of them. We’ve had fun with the soap slime activity, camping indoors and nature painting, but our favourite so far is the coloured rice! We made a heap of it and tried out all of her suggestions. Then, I had an idea for another extension on this activity and I couldn’t wait to try it out with my girls.

While Miss Possum and the Twinkles were playing with the coloured rice (you can learn to make it here), I grabbed a glue stick from the cupboard and drew an animal on the paper in glue. I quickly handed the paper to Miss Possum and asked her to cover the whole sheet with rice. She looked back at me confused.

‘There’s a secret picture on there, it’s magic,’ I said.

‘Oooooh,’ she responded, and her quick little fingers started to cover the paper with rice. Magic is a great encouragement tool!

It’s important to get the rice onto the paper as soon as you’ve finished drawing the animal with the glue stick. Once the glue is on the page it can dry very quickly and that means the rice won’t stick.

Once the paper was covered with rice, we patted the rice down with our hands. We then folded the paper slightly and tipped the loose rice into a container and viola, beautiful animal rice art!

We made quite a few animals and then Miss Possum took over and used the magic glue stick herself and it was my turn to cover the paper with rice.

We also extended the activity by drawing numbers, letters and shapes with the glue stick.

Learning experience for this activity

Fun, interactive and motivating!
Animal recognition
Animal appreciation
Great for fine motor development and hand/eye coordination
The texture of the rice makes for a great sensory activity too!

Thank you so much to Janice for all her hard work on Learning 4 Kids. She is doing a wonderful job teaching her girls, and she’s even teaching mine too!

ABOUT PENNY ANE WILDLIFE FUN 4 KIDS

Penny is a wildlife education officer and a mother of three little girls. She writes Wildlife Fun 4 Kids to show parents that it’s not hard to bring wildlife appreciation into the daily life of your child. Her website encourages a love of wildlife in children through engaging, meaningful and fun wildlife activities.

You can visit Penny’s website at Wildlife Fun 4 Kids, follow her Facebook Page or Pinterest

Filed Under: Fine Motor Play, Learning Play, Sensory Play | Tagged: Tagged With: coloured rice, rice activity, Rice art, sensory activity for kids, sensory game

Learning Colours – PINK

Posted by Janice on November 18, 2012 8 Comments

So far on our colour series here on learning4kids, we have looked the colour RED, BLUE, YELLOW and GREEN. This week we have been playing with the colour PINK!! With having 3 girls in our house, pink is not a hard colour to find!

We have had lots of fun reading the wonderful story Pinkalicious by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann, making wonderful pink play dough creations, practising our fine motor skills with pink pompoms and patty pans, creating pink cupcake collages and some pink sensory play in a pink theme bath with pink flower petals.

If you are looking for more colour activities and play ideas check out our list of EXPLORING COLOURS PAGE

PINK POMPOMS & PATTY PANS

A wonderful and simple hands-on activity to promote the learning of the colour pink and fine motor development as well is playing with pink pompoms, patty pans and mini tongs. Miss 2 had lots of fun picking up the different size pompoms and placing them into the patty pans.

PINKALICIOUS CUPCAKE COLLAGE

Books are a wonderful way of exploring and learning about a new colour and then extending the learning into an activity. We have been reading the story Pinkalicious by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann about a little girl who makes pink cupcakes with her Mum on a rainy day. Without giving too much of the story away, the little girl over indulges on pink cupcakes and turns pink herself. It is a lovely story and we decided to extend the learning about the colour pink and create a pink cupcake collage. We used anything pink we could find around the house. We tore up pink crepe paper, cut up pink straws and pipe cleaners, we also had pink pompoms, buttons, patty pans and pink foam shapes.

Miss 2 covered the cupcake printable with PVA craft glue with a paint brush and randomly placed all the pink craft materials onto the glue and cupcake, covering as much of the surface as possible.

You can download and print this cupcake to create your own Pink Cupcake Collage here: Printable Cupcake

PINK PLAY DOUGH CREATIONS

The possibilities and things you can make with play dough are endless!! AS part of our learning the colour pink this week we also set up an invitation to play at our play table with some pink glitter play dough. We provided as many fun and creative pink materials as possible to promote creativity and the imagination as well as learning the colour pink. There was pink straws, pink pegs, pop sticks, patty pans, pink beads, feathers and a pink safety play dough knife. Miss 2 loved the pink feathers and sticking them into the pink play dough.

PLAY DOUGH RECIPE HERE: BASIC PLAY DOUGH RECIPE

We have added pink food colouring and dark pink glitter to our basic play dough mix to create our Pink Glitter Play Dough.

SENSORY PINK PETAL BATH FUN

Bringing the fun of learning the colour pink into the bath with a sensory play experience with fake pink flower petals! I scattered the bath water with pink fake flowers and a small amount of food colouring. You do not need a lot of food colour, I basically just ran the lid from the food colouring bottle under the running tap and this seems to be enough to give the water a pale colour of pink. I also had a pink boat and a pink fish which I added also.

OTHER PINK ACTIVITY IDEAS TO TRY:

Wear PINK for a day: Dress your child (and yourself) wearing the colour PINK for the day.
PINK Discovery Box: Go on a ‘PINK treasure hunt’ around the house with a box and fill it with as many PINK things as you can find. A box filled with so many ‘PINK’ treasures to pull out to touch and feel, smell, listen to, look at and explore.
Make PINK Cupcakes or Cookies: Cook cupcakes together and decorate them with PINK icing. This is also a great extension activity to follow on from the story Pinkalicious.
Read Books: Choose books that have PINK pictures in them and point them out but also mentioning the other colours too.
Sing Songs about the colour PINK: You can basically take any song and replace some words with the colour PINK. Why not make up your own song or chant with the word PINK?

So far in our Learning Colours Series we have looked at:

Filed Under: Learning Play | Tagged: Tagged With: Learning about colours, Other Colour Activities

Hippity Hop Sight Word Game

Posted by Janice on November 14, 2012 2 Comments

I believe there is a place for a little rote learning and flash cards but I truly believe that most of the learning happens when you are having fun! Miss 4 has been showing a huge interest in reading and writing at the moment and is enjoying learning a small list of sight words I have given her to practice along with her reader.

Hippity Hop Sight Word Game was set up as a way to keep Miss 4 motivated and help making learning her sight words fun.

What you will need?

You will need dots or something similar such as pillows, sight word cards; I have used our free printable apple sight word cards and some pompoms. I love these rubber dots from a twister game we have and we use them regularly in many of our games and activities. It is also great for birthday party games such as musical dots instead of musical chairs. I never have enough chairs! Here I have set up our dots with some sight words placed on top and the pompoms at the end.

We have free printable sight word cards here on learning for kids that you can download and use for this activity. Click on the links below.

I explained to Miss 4 that the dots were stepping stones across a river and a huge smile came to her face. I then continued to tell her that she needed to get to the other side by jumping onto each dot and saying the sight word before jumping onto the next. I asked her “what happens if you get stuck on a word?” Leaving the opportunity for her to help lead the game and Miss 4 then answered that it means she has fallen into the river and will have to swim back to the start! Love the imagination!! I assisted Miss 4 when she got stuck on a sight word offering strategies to decode and problem solve.

Some decoding strategies to try:

Look at the first sound and last sound in the word (some sight words cannot be sounded out).
Look for smaller words within the sight word, such as ‘that’ also has ‘hat’ and ‘at’ in it.
Look for letter patterns such as ‘th’ in the sight word ‘the’.
Is there something interesting about the word, such as ‘was’ sounds like it has a ‘o’ and a ‘z’ in it but it doesn’t and it also make the word ‘saw’ when written backwards.
Say the word in a sentence.

When Miss 4 reached the end of the river she picked up the pompoms and gave them a great shake. It may seem like a basic reward but Miss 4 absolutely loved it! As she improved and got quicker at saying each sight word, we jumbled the sight words up and moved them around.

There are many learning benefits Hippity Hop Sight Word Game:

Interactive and hands on learning; picking up the words, looking at them and hopping from word to word.
Problem solving – using strategies to decode the sight word. Such as looking for letter patterns or smaller words within the sight word.
Memory – Recall, recognise and become familiar with some sight words.
Develop early reading skills.

More Sight Word Activities:

Filed Under: Learning Play | Tagged: Tagged With: Sight Word Activities

Counting & Subitising

Posted by Janice on October 28, 2012 14 Comments

We often recognise the number associated with a particular pattern straight away, even before we have had time to count the items.

What is subitising and why it is important

What is Subitising (Subitizing)?

Subitising refers to immediately knowing how many items lie within a visual scene for a small number of items. It is to have a rapid and confident judgement to know at a glance and without counting to identify the number of items in a group. For example, when a dice is thrown the observer at a glance, immediately and accurately knows how many dots lie on the face of the dice without counting.

These dice activities I have set up for Miss 4 is to practice and develop her subitising skills and to also involve Miss 2 to help her begin this learning of subitising and also counting. We have used a number of props and fun drawings to make the learning fun and motivating!

What you will need?

You will need dice, small round tokens or buttons, medium and small pompoms and subitising pictures with rounds circles to fill with the pompoms and tokens.

I made our subitising sheets using the basic outline of some cute pictures that I photocopied and enlarged. I then traced around the outlines onto coloured paper and added the circles free hand. The larger circles you see on the orange fish have been traced onto the fish using bottle tops.

The aim of this activity to develop the skill of subitising by creating an environment (visual scene) to recognise the number associated with a particular pattern on the dice, with the clusters of circles on the paper and collections/groups of pompoms and tokens made to match that of the dice.

Here the first picture is a great example of demonstrating that 3 groups of items/numbers make 5. 2 and 2 and 1 makes 5. The way that the circles are clustered together and the tokens are placed help create this visual pattern for kids to see and make connections with the number.

This activity also exposes kids (if they are ready) to the concept of addition. First we rolled a 5 and then a 6, how many tokens do we have?

With some of the drawings I deliberately placed the circles into a collection or cluster of circles creating a visual number pattern to assist with the development of this instant recall of ‘how many?’ without needing to count.

Miss 2 had so much fun with this also! As she placed the each token onto the seahorse circles I counted out loud with her as she listened and sometimes also repeated. This is not just a fabulous activity for the littlies to be introduced to counting and basic subitising but also the wonderful development of fine motor skills as each small token is placed carefully over the circles to colour the sea horse picture in.

Why is Subitising Important?

Subitising contributes to early forms of grouping. Seeing parts of a whole or that numbers are made up of other numbers.
Understanding number relations: Interpreting number in terms of part-whole relationships makes it possible for children to think about a number as being made up of other numbers
Understanding number relation: the notion that numbers are within numbers is important for separating, grouping and combining numbers as well as for multiplication, division and measurement.