Children enjoy finding treasures outside. Maja Pitamic, author of “Teach Me to Do it Myself,” suggests harnessing this desire by encouraging students to collect leaves. Ask students to see who can collect the most leaves from different trees. Each student should have a bucket. Assign the students a certain number of minutes to search outside for different leaves. When they’re done, ask them to sort their leaves into different piles. Prentice Hall, a curriculum company, says that to increase their cognitive abilities, preschool students should be faced with problem-solving activities, and sorting the different types of leaves will help stretch the students' abilities. After they sort their leaves, they can make leaf shadings by placing a white piece of paper over a leaf and coloring it with a crayon.
Help students understand how objects are different with a floating and sinking game, Pitamic suggests. Give each child a bowl of water. Ask the children to search around the house or classroom for objects that they think would float. Set a timer for five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, see which child has the most floating objects and declare him the winner. Spend some time discussing why some objects floated and others didn’t. Ask students what the objects were made of, and if that affected how well they floated. Ask students to draw a picture of the bowl and items. They should draw a waterline as well and draw objects either above or below the waterline, depending on whether they floated or not. Try the game again after adding salt to the water to see if the results change.
Improve students’ listening skills with a circle walking game. To play, make a circle on the floor out of tape. Have students stand on the tape and follow the teacher as she does movements around the tape circle. For instance, the teacher could bear crawl, tip-toe or skip around the tape. Simply let younger students try to stay on the tape while they’re doing the movements. Older students can make it a competition and see who can stay on the tape the longest while doing the movements. If a child steps off the tape, he is out and must wait until the next game to play again.