Transporting

What to look for:

Moving all of your loose parts from one side of the room to the other.

What are the children learning?

Distance and journeys. Changes in quantity, adding, taking away and dividing.

Trajectory

What to look for:

Throwing toys, hitting, kicking, climbing. Playing with the taps in the bathroom.

What are the children learning?

How things move and respond. Height and distance.

Transforming

What to look for:

Adding the sand to the water tray, putting playdough anywhere it shouldn’t be. Mixing up the paint. Dressing up.

What are the children learning?

Cause and effect.

Enveloping

What to look for:

Hiding toys, wearing lots of layers of clothes, covering themselves in cream or paint. Filling up containers until they overflow at the water tray.

What are the children learning?

Space and capacity and themselves and how they fit in the world.

Enclosing

What to look for:

Post items down the back of the radiator. Make dens. Hiding themselves. Painting on the walls. Sticking their fingers in holes!.

What are the children learning?

Size, shape, measurement and volume. 

Connecting and disconnecting

What to look for:

Taking off their seatbelt. Tying things up. Taking things apart. Knotting shoelaces. Ripping books.

What are the children learning?

Joining and separating with different materials.

Positional

What to look for:

Lining up toys. Fussy with food presentation. Eats in a certain order. Lays under tables. 

What are the children learning?

Logic, order, sequencing, classification and symmetry. 

Rotation

What to look for:

Fiddles with dials and knobs on IT equipment. Turns on taps. Spins on chairs. Loves watching wheels turn. Watches washing machines. Loves spinning around.

What are the children learning?

How things move, spin and turn..

Orientation

What to look for:

Rocking on a chair. Hanging upside down. Running up a slide..

What are the children learning?

Balance, width, weight and height.