Playschool Activities List: Playschool in such a place where children will have their first experience living outside the confines of their homes and the warmth of their parents and family members.
A lot of parents leave their kids at playschools for various reasons. Irrespective of what the reason is, good playschools are indeed advantageous for the children’s growth. The kind of activities that playschools will have planned up for children will be such that it would give an overall development for the child. A combination of physical and mental activities packed with social activities should be there in playschools
What is the importance of playschools for children?
Playschool will help children develop social and emotional intelligence
Children can group to be either extrovert or introverts or ambiverts. It all depends on their upbringing. But none of their personal idiosyncrasies should affect their career and personal lives in the future. If social stigmas are broke right from a very tender age, then children won’t be hesitant to talk to people and mingle with them or have any kind of stage fear.
As kids grow, they make a lot of relationships, friendship and develop bonds with a different set of people outside their families. These should in no way affect a child’s future or mental or health. And hence, emotional intelligence plays a key role in a child’s development.
Alphabets and number are learnt at playschools first
Do you dream of your kid getting into top universities in the world and making a bright future ahead?
Well, playschool is a start. Today’s playschools are far more advanced than the ones that existed a few years back. Playschools are not just for time passing anymore.Right from a tender age, playschools start teaching kids alphabets and numbers to keep them ahead of the curve. Various creative and innovative techniques are used by playschools to teach children, such as storytelling, lego building, block building, group activities, singing or dancing. These activities are both fun and useful for the development of children.
Playschool gives children care and individual attention
The student to teacher ratio in playschools is usually less when compared to normal schools. This means a kid in a playschool gets more attention and care. This is one of the most important benefits of a playschool.
The atmosphere available at playschool is not available at home
Infrastructure in playschools is made colourful and attractive. Pictures of Disney characters, birds and animals are painted on walls of the school building as well as classrooms. All the ambience, digital infrastructure and the kind of furnishings in a playschool are very children friendly. You won’t find all that in our households. It just doesn’t make sense to create a playschool in a house.
And the most important of all are other kids at the school. Because at the end of the day, any swimming pool, play area, library and cartoon will become boring and monotonous for kids with them having their friend t play with. This type of atmosphere is nearly impossible to build at homes.
Trained and experienced teachers are available at playschools
Teaching toddlers is very different from teaching other children. Teachers have to be more focused and should have lots of patience. Faculty in playschools are specially trained for dealing with children of this age group. They try to understand the mindset of kids and explain things in a friendly manner. This is one of the main benefits of playschool.
Let us now discuss the various activities that a playschool should have. These activities can be used at home too by parents and other family members
15 Playschool activities list that every children’s organisation should have
- Scavenger Hunt
- Memory Book
- Shape hunt
- Measuring game
- Static fun
- Connect the dots
- Storytelling
- Bucket in the ball
- Musical chair
- Puzzle games
- Simple cooking
- Fancy dress competition
- Talent’s day
- Indoor cricket
- Lego building
These Playschool activities list are carefully structured to create an all-round development of children
Let us discuss some of the activity mentioned in brief
Scavenger Hunt
This is a simple activity that can be conducted within the playschool premises.
The game is as simple as it sounds. A group of children will have to hunt for a hidden object, within the playschool area. Here, simple clues will be given to them to decipher the hidden objects’ location
The clues can be in terms of poems or numbers or simple addition and subtraction. So this is a fun way to learn as well as use their thinking abilities to find the object.
This activity helps children improve their
- Thinking abilities
- Coordination with other children
- Learning how to follow rules
- Develop team spirit
Memory book
This activity is designed to help inculcate the importance of tabulating and recording the event
The memory book is nothing but a sort of slam book for children where they write, at the end of the day, what they have learnt in playschool.
Keeping a good memory book helps children learn the importance of keeping track records because what they have learnt should be replicated and repeated often so that they never forget it.
Whether it’s the numbers they have learnt or alphabets or any useful things, everything goes into a memory book. At the end of each day, every kid should read out what he or she has written in their memory book, to the entire classroom. This can also help in eliminating stage-fear among kids.
Shape hunt
Kids (and adults!) love a good scavenger hunt. This game is similar to the scavenger hunt, but the only difference is, it is designed especially to improve the visual power of kids. Objects or paper cuts or crafts of certain shape is hidden or put on table with other shapes, somewhere in the playschool area sn kids, in the group should search for the shape.
Print out or draw a sheet with shapes and let the hunt begin.
This can be done in homes as well. For the kids of age less than 5 in the household, have them find objects that are of simple shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. For kids of age more than 5, the game can be with searches for items in the shape of parallelograms, ovals, rhombuses, or scalene triangles.
This is a great game that can be played inside or outside, with family or teachers.
Measuring game
This is one of the most important activities in our playschool activities list.
This is a wonderful activity for children to learn the use of measurement using scale and tapes.
In this activity, a child is made to throw a wet towel or wet ball of paper on a cloth hung on a wall. The other kids have to guess the height at which the ball was thrown on the clothe wall.
Children will then measure the height of the wet marks clothes walls. Use of scale and tapes will be introduced for the first time to children and it will build curiosity and excitement among them.
The game can also be used to measure everyday objects around us like trees, plants, Smartphone etc.
The winner is the one who guesses the measurement perfectly or near to the correct measurement.
What will children learn from this game?
- Measurement
- Estimation
- Statistics
- Ability to throw
Musical Chair
This shelf have been on the top of our playschool activities list. But nevertheless, this is a popular Indian game that is not only played in playschools but also within households with families. Adults play this more often than, just to bring out the kid in them!
The rules of the game are as follows
- Few chairs will be arranged in a circle and children are made to stand in front of the chairs. If 10 chairs are arranged, then 11 children are made to stand in a circle
- A piece of music will be played for a few seconds and children has to move around the circle as long as they hear the music
- Once the music stops after a few seconds, then children should quickly sit on the nearest chair. The one who does not sit on the chair is out of the game
- Knockout rounds can be conducted until only two participants are left
- The winner of the game is the one who sits on the chair in the last round
This game helps to build healthy completion among kids. This also helps improve their listening ability, concentration and focus on the game.
Static fun
A Playschool activities list will not be complete without a science activity in it.
This playschool game will be like a magical experience for kids. Use of science helps them build interest in the field faster.
Learning about positive and negative charges is pure fun when playing with a balloon. Have your child rub an inflated balloon against their hair and see what they can stick it on or pick up. They will be amazed at how the bits of paper will stick to it.
This static energy can also be used to attract pieces of paper with a ruler rubbed on the hair
While doing this activity, teachers can teach children about the static nature of objects and the basic science behind it.
Simple cooking
We should inculcate the habit of cooking to our children. This should definitely be in any playschool activities list.
Cooking without fire is a concept that schools use to helps build interest among children in cooking. Without fire, cooking should be used because of safety reasons as well as the simplicity in cooking
Children can be thought to make vegetable salads, ice-cream salads or fruit salads. Various other recipes like biscuit dressing or egg salads can be thought in an easy and simple manner.
This activity helps in
- Inculcating healthy eating habits for kids
- Develop cooking skills
- Improves creativity while cooking and food dressing
- Cleanliness and hygiene maintenance can be learnt through this activity
Puzzle games
There are plenty of puzzle games available in the market stores which are exclusively for kids. Paying puzzles will help them improve their mental ability
We get different types of puzzles such as
- Science puzzles
- Family puzzles
- Number puzzles
- Word puzzles
- Alphabet puzzles
Puzzles are always important for a child’s growth. It helps them think. Their logical thinking ability and critical thinking capacity will be enhanced when they play more and more puzzles every day.
A puzzle activity should be conducted every day for at least half an hour in playschools. Puzzles can also be done at home with the help of parents.
Bucket in the ball
This playschool activity gives physical stress and improves mental agility for children.
The game is simple- A small ball should be thrown into a bin kept at around 20m away. This activity can be played in groups as well as conducted on an individual level.
This can be conducted both at playschools and at home.
Fancy dress competition
How many of us, adults, remember our fancy dress completion?
Of course, we all do. It was one of the most memorable days of our childhood.
Dressing up as crickets, actors, policemen, doctors etc are just the most exciting times for kids. Fancy dress competition should be conducted just for the cuteness of it.
This activity should definitely be conducted in playschools not just for the fun of it but also for the creative and fashion enthusiast among children. Trust us; kids learn fashion sense from a very tender age
Who knows, the next Tom Ford or Rihanna might be sitting amongst us!
Talents day
This is not just a playschool activities list, but it is popular even among adults!
The sole objective of the talents day is not to judge or declare a winner among the kids but to help them find their true talent. A talents day in a playschool is far different from the ones that are conducted in colleges or universities.
Here children should have the courage to sing, dance or do anything that they like. Whether they are good or not at what they do does not matter, because the objective of this talents day is different. And moreover, anything and everything that children do will be cute and peasant, unlike us adults!
Read More:
- Simple Outdoor Activities for Kids
- Advantages and Disadvantages of being a Student
- Everyday Activities for 3-Year-Olds
Conclusion
These playschool activities list that we have mentioned is some of the few activities that should be a part of playschool learning for children. Mental health and physical health are kept in mind while designing the structure of these activities.
The main reason parents send their kids to playschools is in the assumption that children will learn better at playschool, with other children, than in isolation at home. Hence, it becomes a responsibility for playschools to fulfil that promise made to parents.
The things that children learn at their tender age stays with them for a long time and hence it becomes utmost important for playschools to have good and competency enhancing activities in their day to day curriculum so that children can make the best use of it. Good activities with a healthy learning environment in playschools play an important role in children’s education.