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Educational Value of Play - Water
Water
Water play is a wonderful sensory activity with many learning benefits to children. Children love to explore using water, so it is a great resource to encourage them to experiment. Simple everyday items can enrich their play as well as commercially made toys (see Add these things!). Utilise their bath time, give them a bucket or tub of water or take them to the beach.
Supervision, even with small amounts of water is critical to ensure children’s safety. A child can drown silently in less the 2 minutes in as little as 5cm of water!! Download the Childhood Drowning Fact Sheet by clicking the link and scrolling down the page to you find the appropriate document.
Physical
Children develop both large and fine motor skills by pouring water from container to container, tipping it into funnels, trying to get it into bottles with small openings, using an egg beater, whisk etc. Let them jump in paddle pools, swirl their bodies around, or just their hands to make whirlpools.
Language/Social Development
Children’s natural enjoyment of playing with water makes it a wonderful social environment where they can play with others, learn to share equipment, talk about what they are doing and how it feels. Freeze coloured water in margarine containers and let children drop them into their water, add bubbles or lux flakes and warm water or simply add coloured food dye to stimulate language. Make boats out of leaves and containers. See how many blocks a container will hold before it sinks!
Language development associated with water pla includes full, empty, shallow, deep, float, sink, more/less than, hot, cold, warm.
Mathematical Concepts
- Equivalency
Children see that containers may hold the same and different amounts of water. They can discover that different shaped containers may hold the same amount of water by using measuring units like a cup to see how many cups of water are needed to fill the container - Units of measurement
Let children begin learning how to use units of measurements by measuring how many cup fulls, lid fulls, bottle fulls etc. They do not need to use standard measures – litres etc – for their measurement. - Conservation of volume
By experimentation, children come to see that the same amount of water fills different shaped containers to different levels, even though the amount of water does not change.