All My Children

Trans

AGE 2 TO 3 YEARS

How it helps your child

This activity extends your child’s vocabulary and helps to reinforce travelling experiences he may have had after an outing or a journey. It can also be used to reinforce left/right orientation.

What you need

3 activity boards depicting air, water and land on one side and outlines of appropriate methods of air, land and sea travel on the other.

27 cards with pictures of varying means of transport. If you wish to make up the game at home use pictures cut out from magazines.

How to play

1. The first step is to ask your child to match the picture cards to the outlines on the activity boards.
2. Following this you can discuss each means of transport and where you are likely to find it. ‘Is it used on land, water or in the air?’. Some of the less obvious ones will be new to young children.
3. The next step is to turn over the activity board to the blank side which only depicts air, land and water. Now ask your child to place the pictures in the right place on the board.
4. He can check to see if he did it correctly by turning the board over again.
5. For older children the other possibilities are to have discussions about how fast or slow the transport goes, or whether it is modern or old fashioned.
6. With children from about 4 years onwards you can ask them to place all the methods of transport facing either the left or the right.

Land Forms

AGE 3 TO 4 YEARS

How it helps your child

As this activity is introduced at the practical life stage it can be initiated as early as 3 or 4 years. It indirectly prepares your child for much later abstract work in geography, but at this stage it will serve to increase his vocabulary.

What you need

Baking trays

Plasticine or plaster

A jug of water

Make plasticine models of a lake and an island. As your child gets older you may make other land forms such as peninsula, gulf, bay, cape, straights, isthmus.

How to play

It is best to do this activity after an outing whenyou have seen a lake or visited an island.

1. Show the child how to pour some water into the tray which represents the lake.
2. Then let him do it and tell him an island is a piece of land surrounded by water. With the lake he sees that it is a piece of water surrounded by land.
3. Follow up activities are to look for puddles in the garden that are like lakes, or to make lakes and islands when he is playing in the sandpit or by the seaside.

From Farm to Table Sequences

AGE 4 TO 5 YEARS

How it helps your child

Following a visit to the supermarket or perhaps a local farm, or even after a walk when you have looked at the countryside and „seen cattle and sheep grazing, or seen wheat growing, you can follow this up with the story of how things get from the farm to the table. You are giving your child information and extending his vocabulary.

What you need

Make up activity cards to go with the ‘Turn Over’ board. These could be the story of milk and the sequence would be cattle grazing, cows being rounded up for milking, the milking machine, tankers collecting the milk, the bottling plant, the milk van, the milk carton on the supermarket shelf or milk bottles on the doorstep, and finally milk in a jug on the family dining table.

Other possibilities are bread and cereal.

How to play

1. Tell your child the story of the journey of the milk and show him the sequence in pictures on the activity card.
2. Then let him play the Turn Over Game and check to see if he did it correctly.
3. Once you have introduced the idea of all the things that happen before food reaches the supermarket shelf and your dining table you will find that your child will begin to ask the question: “Where does this come from?”. Also you could make a collection of all the different packages of cheeses and discuss all the by-products of milk.

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