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Brrr ice play
Brrrr, we have had some frosty days here in North Otago this winter!
Many of us have been sharing stories about frosts at home and how we have noticed that the frost makes our grass crunchy, water frozen and how many of our parents/caregivers have needed to defrost the car windows in the mornings!
We have noticed that here at Kindy too! When it is frosty like this, we love to explore the playground in search of ice, but of course, being very careful not to slip on any!
One of these frosty days was a Monday, and the water trays had filled with rain water over the weekend! This meant we had some very impressive ice sheets in the water trays!
Naturally, the tamariki enjoyed exploring the ice by tapping it, cracking it, dropping it, stomping on it, and some even had a sneaky lick of it!
Everywhere we looked we found more frost and ice, we had so much fun searching the playground, and the most favourite thing to do with the ice was to smash it on the ground!
As it smashed into pieces, we searched for the different shapes and patterns we could see, and we also noticed how thick and large some of the ice was. It was fascinating and exciting indeed!
To add to the fun, we added some paint and paintbrushes to one of the water trays, and the colours were blue and yellow, which were quickly mixed together to make green! The paint highlighted more of those patterns. We noticed that some looked bumpy, some looked like leaves and some looked like snowflakes!
As the ice began to melt, we could see the colours mixing more, and it began to look like a frosty lake!
The tamariki had so much fun exploring the frost this morning, even though it was a bit makariri (cold).
There was so much amazing learning taking place in this activity, including;
-Scientific concepts of freeze/thaw and liquids/solids and, of course, weather patterns.
-Mathematical concepts of shape, size, patterns and colour.
-Social skills from working together as a team.
-Language skills as there were some very in-depth discussion and sharing with kaiako (teachers) and tamariki (Children).