Monthly play roundup: July

We’re right in the middle of winter--the weather is often pretty miserable outside on most days. This is the time in winter where I’m pining for warm and sunny days. But for now we’re staying nice and dry indoors and humming long with out usual hustle and bustle of activities…

The Monkey Game
Earlier this month we celebrated Grace’s fourth birthday. I thought I share one of the party games we prepared which was a version of this game I came across via Pinterest. Nathan helped design a simple board game and I made a giant monkey face with my stash of construction paper. To play the game, each player took turns to throw a dice and move their counters along the board. At the end of their turn, each player then gets to feed the giant monkey a piece of fruit.

Spiders and Spiderwebs
We had a big week of spiders this month. A couple of girls had freaked out over a spider on a spiderweb they came across in the garden one time. So I thought to extend on that encounter into some learning activities. We read some great spider books (‘Walter’s Wonderful Web’ by Tim Hopgood and ‘The Very Busy Spider’ by Eric Carle). We made our own spiderwebs, incorporating threading and weaving. And we made some spider puppets which we incorporated into some nursery rhyme play.

Pete the Cat’s Groovy Buttons
A favourite book we read this month was ‘Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons’ by Eric Litwin. We made buttons from paint sample cards using my circle punch. I printed out some shirt templates for the buttons to go onto.

Circle Drawing Prompts
A simple and fun creative activity I prepared consisted of some pencils and crayons, sheets of paper and circle stencils. The circles were turned into smiley faces, animal faces and even aliens. Lots of scope for imagination through these simple little circles.

Walkie Talkies
One very wet afternoon, the children were running around inside playing fire fighters and policemen. To extend on their play and just for fun, I rummaged through my stash of recyclables (every good educator should have one) and pulled out some wet wipe lids. We turned them into walkie talkies. The fact they flipped open to reveal hidden buttons inside were just a little extra coolness factor.

Cheesy Biscuits
Our favourite recipe this month were these cheesy biscuits. The biscuit dough was super simple to whip up and plenty of fun to roll out and cut out shapes from. The savoury biscuits were a nice change from the sweet gingerbread and sugar cookie dough I usually make for our cookie baking activities.

Pom Pom Drop
A different kind of loose parts I made were using these recycled paper towel tubes. I attached on some magnet strips on the tubes so they could be positioned in different arrangements on the magnet board. We then dropped pom poms into the tubes to explore trajectory, rearranging the tubes to test how the direction of the pom poms change with various arrangements.

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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!