When Carly asked me to write this post I was thrilled and I wanted to find a simple, adaptable game to show the flexibility of science activities. This is a fun activity and with a few tweaks it can be adapted to lots of different ages and used as a game at home, in activity stations at a daycare or classroom, in an individual, group or whole class setting.
The concept is very simple – put things in a bag or closed container so children can investigate them only using touch. Touch is an incredibly important sense, it warns us of danger through heat or pressure, it lets us find and use things, it gives us comfort. It is highly developed in babies and a wonderful way for them to explore and learn.
Babies and Toddlers
Babies and toddlers adore getting things out and putting them back. If you have one bag and several different collections of objects to put inside you can put a different collection in, and the next time they come back there is something new to explore. Or of course you can have lots of different bags! Collections can have all sorts of themes:
- Hard
- Soft
- Rough
- Smooth
- Shiny
- Blue
- Metal
By having a theme you are encouraging them to compare objects and find similarities and differences, which is the beginning of sorting and abstraction. As adults we automatically group things into ‘animals’, ‘dogs’, ‘terriers’, ‘cats’, ‘lions’ but this is something little ones need to learn through experience.
Pre-Schoolers and Junior Primary
For older kids you can extend it to be a little more complicated:
- Get them to compare different collections.
- See if they can think of a rule for the collection.
- See if they can identify an odd one out.
- Give them some extra objects and see if they know which ones match the collection.
- Can they identify something around the room that would also fit into the collection?
- See if they can work together to create a collection for another group.
Science
This activity comes from two areas of science – Natural and Processed Materials and Working Scientifically. Natural and Processed Materials includes investigating properties, in preparation for linking those properties to the materials. Working scientifically includes observation as a practical skill and sorting and comparing as analytical skills. Generating and testing rules is a high order thinking skill.
Language
There is a lot of nice language possible with this activity. First there is descriptive language for the objects themselves. Then there is comparative language when comparing objects within the collection – bigger, heavier, longest. With older children comparing two objects there is even an opportunity to model and practice complex sentences – “This one is rough but this one is smooth.”
That’s just a few ideas of the extensions possible on the basic activity, showing how such a simple idea can become a rich learning experience for lots of ages and situations.
I am one that is always in awe of science and love the endless possibilities that it can provide. Thank you Deb from Science@Home for sharing with us a fantastic game which highlights the sense of touch!
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Some great ideas here!
Our boys love science related projects. I think they just have this natural curiosity about how things work.
Thanks Jodie, I absolutely agree! Young children are natural scientists, it just seems to get lost along the way. I think a lot of that is because parents or teachers think science is hard, so I always aim to show that we’re doing it anyway, we just don’t realise it :)
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