Innovate to Educate

Part Two!

Today was a very exciting Digital Lesson in Pre-K at ...bringing our imaginary monsters to life!

Following on from Part One posted here last week, we embarked on taking our play doh monster creations inspired by our IMAGINATIONS and turning them into real characters we could interact and play with digitally. This reverse AR allows us to take our physical creations and make them digital, all while maintaining a approach.

The children are not fully aware that they are doing anything special; they are simply applying their digital skills to use their iPad camera to scan their monster and bring it into a bare imaginary world. With repetition, the children were able to populate their world with a variety of monsters, with some monsters becoming characters to play with, and other monsters being applied to paint the white world.

We saw wonderful engagement and enthusiasm from our little learners, who dove into this lesson with gusto, complimenting their peers on their worlds, and wanting to know “how did you do that?” when something interesting was discovered. AI has slowly creeped into this unit a little more each year, helping to tweak and enhance the opportunities we offer to our students.

While I am saddened that Hasbro no longer supports this app for future learners around the world, I am so grateful that we pioneered this approach 5 years ago, hopefully inspiring other educators to seek out similar techniques for their students.

Continuing our “learning through play” in the Flopsy Bunnies class, we are making the most of sensory exploration, combining natural materials with technology.

We absolutely loved exploring our new light up cubes, seeing how they react and change colour when submerged in water. Our 2-3 year olds spent a full 30 minutes experimenting, seeing what made the cubes light up and what didn’t, seeing how to put water on their hands to create “magic” when the light was added. We mixed cubes in coloured cups with spoons, poured water, and added the cubes into our salad spinners. This type of play develops the sense of curiosity and finding out while building gross and fine motor skills, all by exposing young minds to technology in different ways.

It was a wonderful exploratory provocation, and shows that technology can be accessible to all ages, even in non-screen form.

I’ve been going down this path lately over discovering ways to bring older tech into the Early Years, allowing new uses and life to be breathed into them.

So far I’ve integrated an old photo copier, overhead projectors, torches inside salad spinners, and today…turning a fan into a wind tunnel 🌬️ 🍁

Our 2-3 year olds had such fun feeding silk leaves into the blowing air, watching them swirl around inside the tunnel, then burst out at the top. They experimented putting one leaf, then two, then scrunching a fistful and throwing them in.

A perfect way to bring autumn into the classroom, mirroring their forest school explorations through technology as we learn through play. Added bonus: finding a use for outdated overhead projector sheets!

Today the Puddle Duck children loved getting stuck into exploring our new “light” provocation. From the giggles at watching the lights spin round and round, to experimenting with different objects hidden inside.

1. Simple torches and salad spinners as the set up.
2. Adding in coloured magnet tiles around the outside for the light to hit.
3. Progressing to adding white paper underneath for the light to shine even brighter.
4. Adding small coloured gems to the spinners.

Great provocation with light but also helping to build gross motor strength for our learners. Tech still being used to explore without any stresses of screen time.

❤️