10 Creative Play-based Learning Activities for Preschoolers

Digital play-based learning not only reflects the cognitive and affective processes that are important in creativity but it also supports the development of creative capability.

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Therefore, as an early childhood teacher, you should do a number of things to encourage and support young children’s creativity and these include:

• Encourage children to look playfully for alternative ways of doing things;
• See that there is always a choice;
• Make connections between things;
• Make unusual comparisons and;
• See things from the point of view of others.

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Children are born creative and curious about things. Creative development in preschool when integrating digital technology is about the quality of the provision, management, careful observation, and matching with child development.

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Developmentally appropriate software programs for preschool and kindergarten children that promote creativity in early childhood education include Paint 3D from Microsoft?(this replaced MS Paint!) and other similar programs or apps such as Tux Paint. This age group of children should use drawing and painting programs at least once a month – frequent enough that they don’t need much review of the tools, yet not so often that they tire of it.

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Additionally, these preschool-age children learn how to use a few tools at a time. For example, when they start they might learn the paintbrush, paint buck (fill), colour palette, and Edit or Undo. It is a good idea to discourage the use of Erasers because too often their immature fine motor skills lead to erasing more than what they intended. You can demonstrate this by making three shapes on their screens and trying to erase the middle one. What this will show is that they will accidentally erase the edges of the other two as well. So alternatively, you would need to show them other ways such as drawing over their mistakes or colour the mistake the colour of the background.

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Listed below are 10 creative play-based learning activities using digital technology. They will refer to making a template. Generally, it just implies a document that cannot be changed.

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Note: These are not my ideas (Hamilton, 2007, p. 79) but you can adapt them to suit your circumstances.

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Hundreds Day Chart

For this activity, you will need to create a template with ten empty squares of various sizes and load it onto each computer. You can then instruct the children to place ten colour shapes in each box. The children who finish early can add labels that count by 10s.

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Following Directions

For this activity, you will need to either draw or download a colouring book-style picture with several large areas for painting. Next, read to the children a colour rhyme that you have written yourself to instruct the children what to colour each section. Here is an example of a rhyme if you had used a picture from The Three Little Pigs – “My house is sturdy, the third pig said. Find his house and paint it _____.” Most likely, the children will guess ‘red’ and paint the brick house. A gallery walk after this project will reveal that even though children use the same colour, the hues they choose will make their pictures look different.

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Glyph

For this activity, a template is once again needed of a basic featureless snowman (or pumpkin, scarecrow, etc) for children to colour. You will need to provide instructions for the children to follow so that they can personalise the picture. For example, ‘add one button for every person who lives in the house; make the eyes the same colour. A gallery walk is a good idea for this too.

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Illustrations

For this activity, the children can demonstrate their understanding of the content through their drawings. After completing the research, students can create illustrations to accompany their reports. Children also illustrate their favourites: a book, a memory of a grandparent, part of the school day, a teacher, or an activity. All these can be added to slide shows, word processing, or simply printed as is.

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Portraits

Self-portraits develop a sense of community within a classroom. Ask the children to do a self-portrait. Or if they are doing a study of family and community life, they can demonstrate their understanding by drawing a family portrait or a community helper such as a police officer, firefighter, doctor etc.

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Half-pages

Some lessons lend themselves to half, rather than whole pages. For example, you might get them to draw on half a page what they think the world would look like if we don’t care for it, and how it will look if we care for on the other half.

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Four squares

Young children sometimes find it challenging to fill an entire page. It might be an idea to consider many ways of using a page divided into four sections. For example, after a classroom teacher reads a book about favourite things, children can draw four favourite things.

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Four step processes

After the children have studied any process that involves four steps they can illustrate what they know. A template that is divided into four sections is ideal for this activity. Arrows can be added to indicate the cycle. The children can draw the steps of the process and label each part.

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Riddles

Another idea for an activity would be to have the children draw an object and write a riddle about it for their classmates to guess. For example, after a unit on nutrition, children draw a nutritious food and write a three-clue riddle.

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Visual Vocabulary

You can use visual vocabulary to strengthen children’s recall in content areas.