Category Archives: Programming Ideas

Clean mud using tin foil cake pans to create individual sensory bins 

Clean mud is a great sensory activity for all age groups. Recipes can be adapted to desired consistency and many items can be added to this activity to make it more interactive. Other great ideas include adding, sparkles, pom poms, animals, Duplo, plastic or stretchy bugs, spoons and cups etc. This school age group, made the clean mud themselves and kept their bins for a week so each child could add to it and use as desired.   

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1 skipping rope, 8 fun activities

There are so many uses for skipping ropes, aside from jumping. A skipping rope is one of those pieces of equipment that checks all the boxes: it’s inexpensive, multipurpose, can be used by toddlers AND octogenarians, it’s transportable, and it can be used indoors or out.

Check out the following games and you won’t be at the end of your rope trying to come up with ideas.  

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39 fun ways kids can play outside this spring

The sun is getting warmer, birds are singing, and my children are shedding their winter gear all over our backyard. Spring is in the air! After the long sleep of winter, nature is filled with a flutter of activity and new energy. Trees are exploding with blooms, insects are buzzing, and critters are busy building nests. The kids are full of energy too! Thankfully, spring offers many simple, easy, and fun outdoor activities for children to get their wiggles out. On that note, here are 39 free and easy activities you can do outside with your kids this spring:

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Making Transitions Fun

As Early Childhood Educators we have a whole slew of tricks up our sleeve, to help us ease the stress of transitions for both educators and children alike. Whether it be finger puppets, songs and/or lyrical poems; we were looking for something more permanent, to up our waiting game. Insert the ‘Hero’ of this story, a wall mounted Alligator busy board! To illustrate the amount of adoration we have for this piece of $269.99 equipment, I will quote one of my staff, “If we had known then what we know now, I would have donated my own money to the purchase of Ali, Alligator”.

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5 Simple Rules

At Keyworth ELC the preschool children created their own set of rules to govern their behaviour when playing with cars. The children and educator sat together and discussed how they could safely play with the cars together. The children came up with a set of rules that the educator wrote down in their exact words. This exercise allowed for the children to take responsibility and create their own boundaries. This empowered them to make safe choices, gave them the tools to regulate their own behaviour and the confidence to explore within the rules they made.

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Who’s That?

This is a game using real photos of staff with and without their masks. During the pandemic, the children faced many changes on a daily basis as everyone around them was wearing masks. Child porters would escort the children in and out of the building as parents were not allowed in. So many faces…some new, some familiar but all of them hidden behind a mask. I wanted the children to be comfortable with the many changes that were happening due to Covid.

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