6 Of The Best Water Play Activities For Early Years This Summer
Make a splash with your children with wet and wonderful ideas for indoors and out
- by Lloyd Burgess
- Former editor of Teachwire
When it’s rainy kids love splashing in puddles. When it’s hot they love splashing about in whatever pools of water they can find or make.
Long story short, kids love water.
So, with that said, we’ve rounded up six fantastic activities from around the web that you can try out in your setting.
1. Attack of the Giant Sponge
First question: Where does one find a giant sponge? Well, Tom Bedard at tomsensori.blogspot.co.uk initially used a cushion from an old couch.
Once it has been thoroughly cleaned you’ve got yourself an excellent addition to your sensory area.
Read all about Tom’s first encounters with his faithful sponge mob here. But then, what’s this? That’s right, the revenge of the giant sponge, on other words, he wrote a follow-up blog post with more ideas.
2. Bootylicious
Sail the seven seas and search sunken ships for salvage with this excellent pirate play idea.
I’ll be honest, I just thought the image of a tub of water with shells at the bottom and a pirate ship floating in it was good enough to include here, but Rachel at stimulatinglearning.co.uk has a whole series of piratey ideas of which this is just one.
Open this treasure chest of activities here.
3. On the tube
Improvised upon the shock revelation that a day of sunshine actually hit our shores, this photo-diary-style post from pre-schoolplay.blogspot.uk chronicles the children’s watery adventures when left largely to their own devices.
The guttering and tubes connecting the various water stations seems to be a big hit, and there are plenty more ideas to be gained too.
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4. Easy breezy
A task that won’t take too long to set up is making these bottle-cap sailboats. They’re easy enough for each child to have their own, to play with, and they can blow them around gently in a container of water, or you can set a course for the boats to go from A to B.
All the instructions are here on kiddycharts.com.
5. Rising damp
This one isn’t for the impatient, so perhaps don’t get children too excited about water play if this is the only liquid-based activity up your sleeve. But if you’ve got the mental stamina to wait overnight for the results this one is a whole lot of fun. It looks pretty too.
And all you need is some glasses, kitchen roll, water and food colouring.
Check out this experiment (and its colourful photos) at we-made-that.com.
6. Stay cool
From one you need to leave overnight, to one you also need to leave overnight…except, last night rather than tonight, you get the point.
You just need balloons, glitter, food colouring and something to put inside the water (in this case toy animals). Oh, and a freezer.
Find out more at fourcheekymonkeys.com here.
Browse more Early Years activities.
