Water Magic in EYFS and Primary
26th January 2022
Young children can spend countless hours playing with water: pouring it back and forth, watching it spill over the edge of a container, blocking its stream, directing its flow, splashing gently, making waves, and pouring some more.
Did you know that this amazing, natural resource has endless benefits for young children's development?
- Water play is a fantastic activity for developing children’s hand-eye coordination as they learn to pour, squeeze, stir and even paint with water.
- As children manipulate water play materials, they build their scientific enquiry and problem solving skills, as they begin to understand why and how things happen.
- When children are engaged in water play, they tend to lose themselves in the activity and can spend long periods of time exploring and playing. This can encourage children to focus, and any activity that holds a child’s attention for a long length of time will contribute to increasing their attention span and ability to concentrate later in life.
- Water play activities help to develop and strengthen children’s gross and fine motor skills. Children enhance their gross motor skills, coordination and physical fitness through lifting, pouring, carrying, running and splashing, while actions such as squeezing help to develop the small muscles in a child’s hands.
Water play is both fun and educational and has a range of benefits for your child’s social and emotional development, as well as developing their physical abilities and early literacy and numeracy skills. As an added bonus, children rarely get bored of it! Take a look at our Early Years Kisongo (EYK) children engaging in some awesome water play this week as they investigated how water flows through pipes and gutters.
It's amazing how those early water experiences can lead to our fantastic scientists and geographers in Year 4 at they investigate the water cycle. Understanding the water cycle, for children, is the first step towards understanding earth science. The water cycle essentially explains the processes water goes through to get from evaporation to rain to our drinking water. Teaching the water cycle will help them better understand the importance of our drinking water supply as well as important processes that the earth goes through.
Take a look at the Year 4 children making a mini water cycle experiment, a cloud in a jar and measuring the cloud cover .
