Food colouring, shaving cream and matchbox cars, let’s put it all together and what have you got? A creative colour play for toddlers focusing on fine motor skills, sensory play, cognitive development and colour recognition.
Colour, is one of the most noticeable attributes of the world around us. For babies and small children, understanding colour is an essential building block they will use for learning in all areas of their life.
We learn through creativity not through consumption. Creativity is the interaction between the learning environment, both physical and social, while producing a perceptible product either through ideas or tangible physical objects.
Setting The Experience
Over the past few weeks we have lots of fun exploring colours. This week we decided to mix two elements- (shaving cream and cars) to create rainbow fun.
We set the creative colour experience up with the help of the children, on the art table using three squirts of shaving cream, adding the food colouring yellow, blue, and red into the 3 piles of shaving cream.
Let the fun begin! The children put their fine motor skills to good use driving the cars through the coloured shaving cream, allowing the colours to mix. The children were so excited, the experience quickly turned from creative play to messy play, being covered in rainbow shaving cream.
Creative Colour Play
Colour plays an important role and can impact an individual’s mood, emotional wellbeing, productivity, learning and behaviour.
Colour recognition helps develop cognitive skills in children by:
- Helping boost creativity and imagination;
- Visual communication; and
- Impacting physiological and psychological behaviour.
Early Years Learning Framework
The early years learning framework (EYLF) enables us to extend and enrich your children’s learning, providing opportunities to develop a foundation for learning and children to be successful learners.
What are the EYLF practices?
- Belonging (building community) – Children need to feel a sense of belonging to be engaged learners. When children feel like they belong, they are more likely to take risks, explore new ideas and try new things.
- Being (the need for affirmation)- Providing children with the environment, resources, interactions, and possibilities that allow them to explore and make meaning that develops their social skills, self-identity, agency, and self-regulation.
- Becoming (personal growth)- When children feel like they are becoming, they are more likely to take risks and explore new things.
Our Creative colour play provided a safe, secure and fun environment for our Dolphin (Gwong) friends to fully engage.
Fun At Home
Here are some ways you can extend on colour recognition at home:
- Colour sorting
- Conversations on colours
- Identifying colours.
Throughout the next half of the year we will continue to develop their colour recognition skills with other fun engaging activities.
That is all this month from Miss Sabrina, Miss Jodie and the Dolphins (Gwong) children.
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