Fish Cove Activities

Let them throw!

Get some tape and make a target on the wall. Put another piece of tape on the floor a few feet away. Find some soft balls and put them in a basket in front of the line. “Want to throw something? Aim for that square!” Find a ball light and soft enough that they can throw it as hard as they want with no negative consequence. Once the basket is empty, they put the balls back as fast as they can. In the classroom, we call this “resetting the center”. It means the child puts everything back the way they found it so the next friend can fairly get a chance to explore. At home, resetting the center can either mark their sibling’s turn, or just restarts theirs.

Want to level it up? Push the line back, make a smaller target or create multiple targets!

Ping pong balls, shaving cream, boxes and bowls, people.

The super fun and awesome thing about ping pong balls and shaving cream is that they kind of stick to each other, making the possibilities extremely broad! You could even go as far as just covering the table with shaving cream (which is also a cleaning agent) and let the crew go ham.

Set this up against a wall or with some kind of catcher behind it, so you don’t have to get aggravated finding balls everywhere if they miss. Put a towel on the table so the kids can quickly wipe the shaving cream off the balls and hands all on their own.

If you want to level it up, get some different sized mixing bowls. You can also just make different dollops of shaving cream and try to aim for certain ones. Heck, you can even put food coloring in the dollops and say “Aim for the blue one, Jr!”

Tip: if you want to exclude the possibility of the balls bouncing off the table, cover the table with shaving cream or just lay down an old comforter you don’t mind getting a little dirty. The cushion will absorb the bounce 👍🏽

Here’s a cool song/activity to do with your kiddos for learning AB patterns!

You can expand the patterns or come up with new ones if you want to do this at home with your children. Also, it’s a great way to also explore rhyming words!

Let’s talk about sorting😃!Sorting is something that we all use and/or experience in our everyday life. We use sorting when we separate clothing when doing laundry or experience sorting when we are at the store and notice how the products are separated. Sorting, for our little ones, has all kinds of benefits. It is great for fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, problem solving, literacy, and language skills.Some ways to sort at home are:

• Separating toys or objects like clothing into groups(color, shape, stripes and not stripes)
• Finding leaves and separating them
• Sorting books-which books look alike? What books are about the same topic? Sorting big books from small books.

Heres a fun and easy sorting invitation that involves using materials that most of us have under our couch cushions 🤣! It’s called Coin Sorting! Objective: Children will be able to focus attention on sensory characteristics of each coin. Being able to decipher appearance, texture, weight, color, smell, and sound.Materials:

• Pennies
• Dimes
• Nickels
• Quarters
• 4 small bowl or cups
• 1 big bowl or cup

instructions : Put a large bowl in the middle and add all coins to the large bowl . Place 4 empty bowls around the large bowl. Have the children sort coins.Questions to ask:

• What is similar about the coins? What is different?
• Which coin is bigger? Which coin is smaller?
• What color are the coins?
• Which coin do you think weighs more? Why do you think that?
• Do you know the names of the coins? Feel free to name them with your child.

Agility!
Here is a wonderful large body movement activity. Unlike most Reggio scenarios, this activity is very controlled. A lot of times in Reggio teaching, activities that have a lot of structure and have one prescribed outcome feel new and exciting for the kids.

When we first introduced the agility cones to the kids, we created ground rules. We had to set it up as a super controlled, huge deal type game. “Okay, you see these? Your feet do not touch them, they go around and over them. Your goal is to complete this agility course as fast as you can like this- watch my feet (give them a demonstration)”. Start with a simple course to start, then gradually make it a little more complicated. Let them go one at a time. After a while, you can even bump it up to a relay race.

The more they became used to the agility races, we allowed them to design their own courses. A lot of times, we would break these out in the classroom for one friend at a time when they had a lot of “outdoor energy”.

Is your play set wet from previous rain? Send some stuff down your slide and make a big SPLASH!

We had so much fun sending this big tire down our wet slide. To make this activity work with minimal arguing, we had to assign jobs: the rollers and the catchers. The rollers had to line up the tire just right on the slide and send it down when the coast was clear. The catchers caught the tire and rolled it all the way back up to the top of the hill.

We recorded each roll in slow motion and let the kids watch the videos at morning meeting. All of us got such a kick out of it! We explained how slowing down what you see in a video also slows down what you hear, making it sound a little different. But, who are we kidding, this was all about the laughs and how cool the big splash looked in slow motion!