News And Events

Spring Games

We’re heading into Spring! As trees come to life with blossoms and new leaves and flowers start to appear, it’s a great time to explore parks and nature walks. Take a recyclable bag on your walk and collect natural resources such as leaves, flowers, stones, twigs etc that have fallen to the ground. Back at home, you can create a variety of art such as:

• Collage artwork on paper
• Use the resources to group into colour, type, or size – count to see how many are in each group
• Line up all of the resources in order from smallest to largest
• Arrange your resources on a sand dish, creating a miniature garden arrangement

The possibilities are many, and as tamariki experiment with natural resources they are gaining skills such as learning about mathematical concepts of grouping, counting, estimating, and ordering.

With the support of adults, older tamariki might also engage in a game of choosing a resource and, using descriptive language, share with others about the resource they are holding. Another similar game is to choose some of the natural resources and cover them with a blanket, then each child can take turns to put their hand under the blanket to locate an object, and then describe it to see if the others can guess what the resource might be. Then lift the blanket off to see if your guess was correct!

Games such as these encourage tamariki to engage in literacy and using their imagination to think of descriptive words. Learning through play and having fun!