Ways to Play with Aluminium Foil

Aluminium foil (or tin foil for all my US friends!) is relatively inexpensive and its shiny, foily qualities make it a great fun thing to include in play ideas.

We like to:

• Cover blocks and boxes and containers in it to make rockets and robots and spacey play scenes. Building with blocks and creating fun scenarios builds on imagination, creativity, language skills and motor skills.

• Roll it into balls to play with, building on motor skills and eye-hand co-ordination.

• Cut it and tear it because it’s easy to work with and makes a great sound. This works motor skills again and it is also a great way to practice cutting skills. Tearing and crinkling is a great way to explore the senses too.

• Paint onto it to give our paintings a different finish. Painting is a great fun art and craft activity that builds on spatial awareness, creativity, motor skills and knowledge of colours, shapes and patterns.

• Wrap up presents for soft toy birthday parties. Foil folds easily and doesn’t necessarily require sticky tape. Playing party games builds on social skills like empathy, compassion, care and nurturing. Looking after and organizing toys is also a great opportunity to build on language skills.

• Include it in collage crafts. Shiny foil makes a great body for a robot or a magical mermaids tail or bright, sparkly fishy scales. Cut out some squares for a robot or scales for a fish or a long mermaid's tail. Give your child the cut-outs, some glue, some paper to stick the shapes onto and some pens and textas to draw on and around the foil cutout. Crafting builds on motor skills, creativity, imagination, language and spatial awareness.

Have you used foil in your play?

Ways to Play Together

It's school holidays here in Victoria and all over the state, children of different ages are coming together to play. I like to have lots of time at home while the kids are on holidays and love to find ways to get my two kids happily and busily playing together. Here are some of my best 'play together' ideas:

Find a common interest - my two just love to play games with their soft toys. So, I have all they need for their imaginative play games available to them always. That way, they can play as the mood strikes them and cater their play to the interest thay have at the time. They have their school, beds, clothes, food, textas, paper, pens all tucked away neatly in these baskets so they can pull them out whenever they like (without involving me - yipee!)




Like I said, my kids love tehir soft toys, but these baskets could be easily filled with rocks, animals, cars, blocks, rockets or dress-ups.

I like to set things up for them too. Sometimes it can take just 5 minutes to throw an open-ended activity together that the kids will play with for hours.

Our favourites are

Painting

I pour out some colours, put out brushes and a few other painting utensils, paper and a drying rack and leave them to it. Sometimes we use cardboard cut-outs we even like to use canvases sometimes too.




Building

I've written about this before, but just taking a bit of time to set up Lego for 2 or 3 or 4 can make a big difference to how long children will play there. Of course this works well for all types of building materials



Sensory Play

We love water play here, but these containers could just as easily be filled with sand or mud or coloured cornflour and water. Now that the kids are bigger, I'll just pull out the container of water toys and plonk them in the middle. They need a bit more space now too, so I like to give them a couple of different areas to play in. It makes the play a little more elaborate and so keeps them busy for longer.

Dramatic Play

I think it's great to sacrifice a small area of lounge room to make a dramatic play space that can stay set up too. Our favourites are a zoo, a restaurant, a cafe, a doctors surgery a shop and of course, good old home corner! (my apologies for the grainy photos, but you get the idea!)





I'm going to take a little bloggy break for the rest of the holidays. I'll be back on October 10 with another "Play Moment Monday". In the meantime, Happy Playing!

Belinda x

Setting Up Lego Play

Lego has been the toy of choice here over the last couple of days. I haven't met many kids over the years who don't love playing with those cheerful, colourful, perfectly-sized little blocks.

The benefits of building with Lego are enormous. It
- works the fine motor muscles really, really well
- develops eye-hand co-ordination and spatial awareness
- builds on planning skills
- helps concentration
- brings attention to detail
- works pre-literacy skills when kids follow instructions to build something specific
- can be a wondeful medium for building imaginative play elements

I like to set it up like this.



I find it is much easier to find specific pieces when I take a few minutes to put the Lego into baskets and plastic containers. That means there's not a massive bucketful tipped out all over the floor and the kids don't need to break out of their creative momentum to go searching. That leaves more time for building, learning and fun!

Lots of fun with a Marble Run

One of our all-time favourite toys would have to be our Marble Run. I remembered the kids at kinder absolutely loving this toy, so I bought one for Em (well, Santa delivered one) when she was around 2.



She has had hours of fun with it and in the past year or so Ed has started to really enjoy it too.

It is something that requires a reasonable amount of adult-help to begin with. I've taken the time to build some runs with the kids so that get an idea about how it works.

But, once they get the hang of how it works, it allows for lots of opportunities to problem-solve, plan, build, co-operate, negotiate, follow instructions, imagine and create on your own, hypothesise and then of course, there's the irresistible fun of sending lots and lots of marbles scooting down the run.



If you don't have one at your house, I highly recommend it. It's worth investing a bit of money on one with lots of pieces and sturdy construction and buy an extra bag of marbles for even more fun!

Inspiring Play

Some of you might be surprised to learn, I don't really play with my children very much. Sure, I've been known to put on the odd dress-up and I've certainly eaten a lot of pretend food and drunk many cups of pretend tea, but it's not very often I sit and play with them for long periods of time.

This is completely deliberate. I think child's play is and should be a child's domain and too much involvement by grown-ups can actually remove a lot of the benefits play can provide.

Don't get me wrong, I always keep an ear out to hear how they're playing and I think a lot about what they play with and how they might use it. I also 'check-in' often to ask about what they're doing and offer help and suggestions if it's needed. I guess I try to inspire play and help the kids to build on their own ideas. I think it's really important for their problem-solving, imagination, creativity and ultimately their self-esteem

A great example of this happened on the weekend. The children were busy building with some 'mobilo' close to the kitchen where I was preparing dinner.

Em came up to show me some of what she'd been doing. She had made a perfectly working see-saw. Always keen to extend on what they're doing, I said to her "that would make a great see-saw for one of your 'Littlest Pet Shop' toys, wouldn't it". "Yeah" she yelled and ran back to where she was working to share this new information. "Ed", she said "my 'Littlest Pet Shops' could fit in this see-saw and in all these other things we made". "We could make Littlest-Pet-Shop-Town" he said.

So, they set about it with a new purpose to their building and an extra dimension to their play.





This idea turned a couple of hours of building into an imaginative play game that grew and evolved and blossomed for the whole weekend, giving so many areas a developmental work out. The kids were building on many, many skills including:
- imagination
- creativity
- problem solving
- fine motor skills
- eye-hand co-ordination
- planning
- negotiation
- language skills
- story-building/literacy skills
- concentration



I'm still not allowed to pack it up today

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up