Earth: Bozo Bucket Continent Toss (Earth)

Today was our first spring session. Our theme this time around is "Earth." To warm up, we started with a dancing game: 

“Dancing around the Continents”: We spread out pictures of our continents on the floor. We danced around the continents when the music played, when the music stopped, we found a continent to stand on. We came up with fun ideas how to get from one continent to the other, e.g., flying, swimming, etc.

Earth Collage: We all worked together and created a representation of our earth by attaching different collage materials (e.g., maps, pictures of buildings, stickers of animals, plants and people) to a big sheet of contact that was secured to the table with the sticky side up. We loved adding the glitter representing our oceans and deserts.

Continent Bozo Buckets: Buckets representing the continents were spread out. The player whose turn it was stood behind a line and tried to toss a bean bag into one of the continent buckets. Each player could try 3 times to hit a bucket. If the player hit the target, he/she could draw an animal card out of the bucket. The flashcards were showing animals that live on that particular continent. 

This game addresses not only a variety of social skills such as turn taking and practicing good sportsmanship (e.g., cheering) but also provides great language opportunities such as learning the names of the different continents as well as the names of the animals that live on these continents. It also leads to natural opportunities for peer communication/interaction, e.g., the players can show the animal card they drew out of the bucket to their peers and structured questions can be asked to start a verbal exchange (e.g., "Do you like that animal?" "What is your favorite animal?").