This year I am continuing on with my role as Playgroup Co-ordinator. I felt like I quite literally hit the ground running ( as the expression goes) with the start of this year. There is always a lot of administration type work that goes on behind the scenes and then there is the weekly program planning.
I am so fortunate to have a great lady who helps me out each week and I'm able to delegate all the stories and music and songs to her - she has a background in early education and does an amazing job - the kids and parents alike all adore her. She even has a great crocodile puppet she uses which the kids totally love.
We run two playgroups each week, so that leaves me with organizing the activities and crafts for each week for the two groups. We've seen a growth in numbers this year, which has been fantastic, but I'm finding it requires a bit more time for preparation, especially for the crafts.
I thought I'd share a couple of ideas with you which we have used recently.
We actually did the coloured rice towards the end of last year.
This is one of the crafts we used it for. We also used it to decorate sea creatures recently and they looked great - very colourful. Sorry I don't have a picture of those.
This week I had my daughters help me at home and we had a fun time colouring uncooked pasta. There are several ways you can colour rice and pasta, we just went with what we had at home. We used simple food colouring and a few drops of water - inside a zip-lock plastic bag. Add the rice (or pasta), seal the bag and gently shake around until the colour disperses and covers all the contents. We then spread the contents out onto trays lined with paper towel to absorb the liquid/moisture and left to dry. It was quite a warm day, so they didn't take long to dry. I removed the paper towel part way through the drying process to get rid of the dampness completely.
You can see we had fun experimenting with lots of colours!
This is what we made with the coloured pasta this week. All the playgroup children had fun making faces and their own versions of coloured pasta artwork - it was a huge success and so easy for little hands to work with on their own!
I have stored the various colours of rice in plastic takeaway colours and they seem to store really well - even through our summer heat and humidity. I will do the same with the pasta and see how that goes.
I am always on the look-out for craft ideas for playgroup - so if you know of any or can refer me to a great website - please take the time to let me know - I would be very appreciative!
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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