Capturing The Imagination

The imagination is a powerful thing and one of the most important aspects of a child learning and growing in their own unique way. Whether it is through learning activities or play-time activities, children engage with their imagination to let it roam free to create craft, formations, rhythm and the exchange of ideas. As your Marsfield childcare centre, Imaginations Pre-School educators embrace diversity and the richness of children’s imaginations; it’s in our name after all. Imagination aids children to perceive and ascertain things about their world around them and engaging in imaginative play is an effective way of dialling into the imagination. Expression of oneself verbally and physically is important for children and imagination allows them to engage with various roles in role-playing games and scenarios, often modelled on their reality around them. Role play activities permits a child to push boundaries in a safe and controlled manner if you help facilitate or monitor the role play by ensuring it is in a safe environment. Letting the imagination roam free is important but so is permitting this in a safe manner in a supportive environment like our Marsfield childcare centre. Encouraging imaginative play often involves the provision of props such as puppets, dolls house and dolls or arts and craft materials. Motivating children to engage in a creative manner with props or activities fosters the roaming of the imagination and even making up stories and providing story-telling opportunities helps the imagination flow. Imaginations Pre-School Marsfield aids children to engage in imaginative play, games and puzzles, problem-solving and cognitive development through various activities. The possibilities are almost limitless when it comes to the imagination so at our Marsfield childcare centre we allow children to activate their imagination and we encourage families to do the same at home. We feel that we are like an extension of the home so we endeavour to help all children grow and develop as unique individuals.

The Five Senses For Learning And Development

Engaging the five senses is an important attribute of learning and development within children and our Marsfield childcare centre provides opportunities for children to explore their senses. Sight allows children to visually perceive their surrounding environment, sound enhances auditory stimulation and perception, touch enables children to understand objects and formations and recognise these by feel, smell can incite a pleasurable experience with what the nose can sense and taste fosters engagement with different flavours of food. To drive visual perception and understanding of the sight sense, you can model positive expressions and our educators are highly-adept at this and this can motivate children. Utilising colour schemes and patterns or different colours for coding is another way to promote learning with sight. Similarly to positive expressions, using a positive tone of voice is important for children to hear and enhances their ability to comprehend when they have engaged in positive behaviour. It also fosters participation and enhances self-confidence and esteem. Music is a natural winner for auditory stimulation and there is a connection between music and cognitive abilities. Sensing temperature through touch is important for children such as recognising ice compared with heat packs and further development of the touch sense can be achieved through sensory toys and finger painting. Said to be the strongest sense, smell can either promote distaste or pleasure for something and having lavender, rosemary or peppermint smells within the classroom can be fruitful for the sense of smell. Lavender is known for its calmative properties, rosemary for reducing mental fatigue and peppermint drives energy levels. Providing children with various food items for morning tea and/or lunch is important for getting them acquainted with various taste/flavours and at home it is a good idea to make food together. Meanwhile at our Marsfield childcare centre, we foster enhancement of the five senses through positive sensations.

Stimulating Games For The Five Senses In Young Children

It is highly important to stimulate the five senses within young children very early on so that they may grow with understanding the world around them through their senses. For sight activities, matching games with pictures is an effective way to engage visual senses as well as exploring colours. A traffic light game is a good way to engage sight and comprehension of what green and red mean if you have a green card and a red card and have the children walk around in a circle watching to see when you hold up the red card for stop. “Simon Says” and musical chairs are two fabulous ways to engage the sense of sound as well as getting children to follow song and rhythm. Playing in sand and mixing dirt and water are two ways to stimulate the touch sense and playing with sensory toys and objects are great for children understanding what certain objects feel like. Activating the sense of smell can involve spraying certain scents in the air within the classroom, playing with scented bubbles and having jars with different scents such as candles is an effective way of engaging the sense of smell. With taste, children can often be rather fussy but if you engage them in a taste test of different ingredients such as lemon, honey and salt, children can identify the sour, sweet and salty taste of each respectively. Having food from other cultures can expand the tastebuds which is good for healthy eating of a variety of food. Our Marsfield childcare centre, Imaginations Pre-School understands the importance of stimulating the five senses and engaging children in activities which aid development of each sense.