Theme-based learning is a great way to dive deep into a topic of interest with your little learners. When you follow your child’s interests, they’re going to be eager and excited to learn more! And when you’re using play as a vehicle for this learning, magic happens!
Each month inside my Little Play Club membership, I share a new themed play pack with our members. They’re just one of the incredible reasons why hundreds of playful parents and educators from around the world have joined our community. Inside these packs, I develop a whole bunch of ideas to help develop fine motor skills, early mathematical skills, sensory exploration (like our messy pig below!!) and even some literacy learning too!
There are sensory play ideas, process art activities, fine motor invitations and so much more included every single month – all designed by me (an early years teacher!!) to develop all of those important early skills in an age-appropriate, playful way! These packs are designed for children up to age 6 and we have a whole lot of fun as a family testing the activities together before we share them in our community.
A few months ago, we prepared a very special Nursery Rhyme Play Pack for our members! Our daughter Audrey was 2 at the time and she LOVED getting stuck into all the playful activities and invitations.
In this particular pack, we included several popular nursery rhymes including Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the Wheels on the Bus, Incy-wincy Spider (or Itsy Bitsy Spider depending where you’re from haha!), Baa Baa Black Sheep, Old Macdonald Had a Farm, Thie Little Piggy, Humpty Dumpty, 5 Little Speckled Frogs, 5 Little Ducks and Jack and Jill.
We included a variety of printables and play ideas for each of the Play Packs ready for our members to use with their little learners. Above you’ll see an example some of the activities we included for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star including a craftivity activity we included for each of the Nursery Rhymes. Our little learners then created their very own Nursery Rhyme booklet with all of their craftivities!
One of our clever members, Joh, used her Nursery Rhyme Play Pack to create this gorgeous investigation table for her little learners. She even made some cute little puppets with paddle pop sticks and some of the printables for Old MacDonald Had a Farm. As her little learners explored, they would have been developing so many incredible oral language skills and content specific vocabulary, all while they played!
Another clever member, Kelly from @playskillsandsensorythrills, set up an investigation table for her three boys! One of their favourite activities was the Wheels on the Bus BINGO game! Rachel from @teamjms_atplay also used these printables for a fun counting activity with some loose parts! I included various game boards and cards so that older children could match number words and younger children could count passengers and match them to the numeral!
Below you’ll see a fun Humpty Dumpty craftivity including a jumbled sentence to cut out and assemble for our preschool kids! Activities like these are wonderful for developing a range of skills including fine motor skills, scissor skills, sentence structure, pre-reading skills, pencil grip and creativity!
One of my favourite activities from this play pack though, was our Nursery Rhyme Scavenger hunt! We printed nursery rhyme cards and hid them around the house ready for our little learners to find. I even included a few different recording sheets so each of our three children could play. Below, you’ll see the picture match recording sheet that our 2 year old was able to use as well as some examples of other recording sheets we included for older children too!
When you join the Little Play Club as a monthly member, you’ll get access to a new Play Pack every single month. And if you sign up for the whole year, you’ll get access to all of the previous Play Packs from the last three years too! Click here to get your name on the wait list or grab a copy of our Nursery Rhyme Play Pack now and have a little taste-test of just one of the incredible resources waiting inside our beautiful Little Play Club community!
