Role playing is more than just a fun and active thing for kids to do. Not only does pretending to be someone else help nurture a child's imagination but it also improves social interaction and helps them understand their surroundings better. According to The Kids Window website, one-and-a-half and two year old children who engage in role playing should show a significant increase in the use of certain areas of the brain. This brain activity improves a child's cognition (learning and reasoning) and can also teach him how to control behavior and understand the social interactions of other children. Some examples of role plays include the zoo, a kitchen or a restaurant; use props and costumes to make the lesson more interactive.
Songs are a great way to engage an entire class and get them working together. Songs are also interactive and can help improve a child's hearing, rhythm and musical understanding. Younger students also love to make noise; harnessing that into an educational and interactive activity is a good way to control a classroom. You might consider buying a CD to play as a backing track, or you could learn the guitar or piano chords if you know how to play. Either way, teach the infants the words to the song and get them to sing along. Even if a child is too young to sing or form words, getting her to clap or to hum to the song will still help her musical understanding. Some good example songs include nursery rhymes and clapping songs like, "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands."
Getting the kids to use their senses of sight, smell and touch is a good way to improve each of them. One way to make this fun is to add simple household ingredients to ordinary play dough. For example, adding strong-smelling cooking extracts can make any piece of play dough sensitive to the nose. Some good example ingredients include almond and peppermint extract. Similarly, add food coloring or Kool-Aid to play dough and it will become colorful, thus engaging a child's sense sight. Adding glitter, coffee grounds and clean sand to basic play dough will also make it textured and will trigger a child's sense of touch. Ensure that you warn the children not to eat the dough and keep a close eye on them at all times.
Paper is a cheap material you will find in most school stock cupboards. Getting the children to use paper for artistic purposes is another good way to nurture their imagination and creativity. One example activity is to make a sun-print, which simply involves the kids choosing a piece of colored construction paper and laying it out in the sun. Get the kids to lay objects on the paper in an artistic way (e.g. buttons, leaves, pencils) and allow the paper to soak up the sun for an hour. The end results should be a piece of paper with the object silhouettes on it. Making paper chains (wrapping a strip of paper around several others to make a chain) is also an interactive activity that does not require any specialist materials or much preparation. Hang up the children's work to decorate the room and give them a sense of pride.