Monthly play roundup: October

So loving the warmer weather we’ve been enjoying this past month! It took some time to warm up but we’re definitely enjoying more and more of a springy-summery vibe in the weather. We’ve been heading outdoors a lot more over the past few weeks with lots more free play to shake off the winter chill in our bones. But we still manage to squeeze in plenty of semi-structured activities in between. Here’s a peek at some of them…

~ I Can Spell My Name ~
With a couple of the kids transitioning to kindy next year, I’ve started incorporating more literacy and numeracy activities into our programme. This is the ‘I Can Spell My Name’ activity tray magnetic letters and printed laminated cards of the children’s names. They’ve caught on pretty quickly. I usually leave the tray out in a common area so they can visit it whenever they like throughout the day to have a go at spelling their name.

~ Jonathan & Martha ~
We revisited one of my favourite children’s books, which I featured in this post some time back. We made some worm puppets using coloured straws. The children practiced their scissor skills by snipping the straws into smaller pieces to use as beads. Then they exercised their fine motor skills by threading the straw beads onto a piece of string to form a long wriggly worm. I helped them to attach two more straws, one at the head and one on the tail, for them to hold to make their puppet wriggle and move.

~ Egg Carton Worms ~
I’m always hoarding bits and pieces to recycle for art and craft activity. We turned some egg cartons into worms with some paint and googly eyes. We then played out the story of ‘Jonathan & Martha’ together using the straw worm puppets and egg carton worms for the children to practice their story sequencing and verbal skills.

~ Dog’s Colourful Day ~
Another book we enjoyed reading was ‘Dog’s Colourful Day’. The children used dot markers to decorate printouts of ‘Dog’ with some colourful spots. They then went on to make their own open ended spotty pictures. I then extended the activity into a pre-writing exercise by drawing some outlines of letters and shapes for the children to trace along with the dot markers.

~ Rectangle and Squares ~
Doing one of our open-ended/journaling sessions, a couple of the children showed interest in drawing trucks and vehicles based on rectangle shapes. I decided to extend on this by setting out some coloured paper squares and rectangles and encouraging the children to create their own pictures with the shapes. Similar to this geometric collage picture activity I did previously.

~ Room on the Broom ~
And finally, we ended the month of October with a Halloween theme activity based around the story ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson. We made our own mini brooms with some sticks, brown paper bags and string. The children practiced their scissor skills by cutting and snipping ends of paper bags into long strips to form the ‘bristles’ of the broom. They wrapped the bristles around the end of a stick and I helped to secure it on with some string. We played out the story with a doll dressed up as a witch and our plush animals and puppets.

 

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If you enjoyed this post, you can check out last month’s roundup of activities and more of my other play and learning ideas. Stay tuned for next month’s roundup!