Hui Li

Various waste materials are made into toys and teaching aids and used in kindergarten activities, which not only enhances children's environmental awareness, but also cultivates the virtue of thrift and diligence, and promotes children to explore and play new tricks.

Xin Zhao

The "Guidelines for Kindergarten Education" points out: "Children's education resources are everywhere. Only by developing and utilizing rich resources in various ways and in various ways can we promote the all-round development of children." In our lives, waste materials can be seen everywhere, and they are good educational resources. How to effectively use these waste materials for processing and production, so that they can become substitutes for early childhood education. At the same time, kindergartens spend more and more money on various toys and teaching aids, but the ready-made toys and teaching aids are single in play. After the children play a few times, they lose their novelty and throw them aside. The expensive toys and teaching aids do not show their due value. Therefore, "turning waste into treasure" has become a project of our teaching research topic. Collecting various waste materials through multiple channels, making them into toys and teaching aids and applying them to kindergarten activities not only enhances children's environmental awareness, but also cultivates the virtue of thrift and diligence, and promotes children to explore and play new tricks. At the same time, it also saves money for the kindergarten, reflecting the educational concept of low investment and high efficiency.

Selection of waste materials

In the activities, the selection and placement of materials is an important and complex task, which is related to the success or failure of the activities. First of all, the selection of materials itself should have a certain degree of exploratory nature, which can stimulate children's positive thinking and guide children to actively discover. Secondly, the selection of materials should be close to life, and "little surprises" should be found in the inconspicuous small items in life, encouraging children to love life and learn to find suitable opportunities. Finally, the difficulty of material operation should be suitable for children, and the selection of materials should be based on the perspective of children's intellectual development. Materials that are complex or unsafe to operate should not be blindly selected. Based on the above factors, I chose "waste plastic bottles" as one of the materials for our class's regional activities. Bottles are readily available in life, and every parent and child can bring discarded bottles to kindergarten.

Application of turning "bottles" into treasures

District activities are a process of allowing children to explore, discover and improve themselves. Many of our district activities are preset by teachers, and children are rarely allowed to explore and discover themselves. There is a lack of flexibility in the activities, and children just blindly play the games preset by teachers. In fact, teachers can start from the interests of children, which can not only allow children to better acquire knowledge, but also improve their hands-on operation ability. The following is my practice of applying waste plastic bottles to various activity areas.

Art bottles

Decorating bottles is one of the most popular activities in my class. By studying book materials and drawing on video materials, I first made a large number of bottle dolls, bottle animals and various vases as examples and references, and placed a large number of auxiliary materials. Such as wool, colored clay, crepe paper, cotton, etc., for children to learn and innovate. In the activities, teach children how to fix the required materials on various bottles, and encourage children to learn to observe the shape and color of bottles while imitating teachers, and to innovate designs reasonably and boldly. At the end of each activity, I would ask the children who had completed their works to show and explain their works, and the children who had not completed their works to talk about their ideas, which greatly mobilized the enthusiasm of the children to participate in this activity. Some children did not forget this activity when they went home on Saturdays and Sundays. They found bottles at home and designed and made interesting bottle animals with their parents, and brought them to the kindergarten on Monday to play with their friends.

Bottles on display

Speaking of the bottle exhibition activity, I really want to thank the parents and friends in our class for providing us with a variety of educational resources. In fact, my idea of carrying out the bottle activity was very simple at first, which was to let parents bring bottles to the exhibition area, so it was also written very simply in the notice. I was quite surprised when I collected the bottles on Monday. The bottles brought by parents were of different shapes, colors, and patterns. They were strange and varied. None of them were casual and simple bottles. The children rushed to introduce their bottles to me and my companions: "My dad asked for my bottle at the restaurant downstairs." "This is my mom's perfume bottle, and she poured out the perfume." "Grandpa treated us to the old wine he had saved for many years and gave me the bottle." Even Zhang Jiahui, who usually doesn't like to talk, told everyone loudly: "My bottle was taken from my grandpa's house in the development zone." The parents' spirit of cooperation and the children's passion gave me motivation and inspiration. I immediately designed and organized bottle activities in the exhibition area, including: talking about my bottle, what the bottle is made of, and the purpose of the bottle. Through this series of activities, bottle guides for the exhibition area were trained. In each regional activity, these guides will take turns to introduce the bottle to their companions.

Narrated Bottles

The language area is the area where children practice speaking and develop language. Through the interaction between children and materials, children are stimulated to think and practice telling stories. The material preparation and activities in the language area are divided into two categories. One is the retelling activity designed based on the theme of multiple intelligences. For example, based on the content of "The Carrot is Back", I drew a background picture and pasted it on the table. I used bottles to make three-dimensional images of the main characters and animals in the theme, so that the children could demonstrate the characters and tell stories on the background picture. The second type is a voluntary storytelling platform created to exercise children's language construction ability and give full play to their imagination. I prepared a variety of background plates related to places, seasons and times, and used bottle caps to make a large number of characters and animal chess pieces, so that children can choose and tell their own stories during activities, which greatly promoted the development of children's language.

Puzzle Bottles

The formation of number concepts and the development of preliminary logical thinking are important development goals of middle-class mathematics activities. In the puzzle area, I designed a series of activities such as "blue grid bottles, red grid bottles", "covering bottle caps", and "line up bottles with dots" to guide children to learn while playing. The specific way to play is to dress up bottles of the same size and shape as blue grid bottles and red grid bottles with paper strips. During the activity, I asked the children to sort the bottles according to the activity logo and try to learn to record the sorting. "Putting on the bottle cap" means putting different numbers of dots on the body of each small bottle and numbers on the bottle cap. Children match the number of dots with the number and screw on the bottle cap. "Line up the bottles with dots" is another way to play the previous material, which is to count the number of dots on the bottles, and line up the bottles from many to few or from few to many, or in odd or even numbers. These activities undoubtedly provide conditions for the development of children's mathematical thinking.

Dynamic bottles

Many sports toys are only suitable for children to play outdoors, and in winter when there are few opportunities to go outdoors, many toys will not work. The bottle activities I designed are not only suitable for children to play outdoors, but also suitable for children to play in the morning and after-meal activities indoors. See who rolls faster, who feeds more, who gets around more cleverly, etc., that is, put various beans in the bottle, and the children roll the bottle on the ground, making a sound while rolling forward, which is very attractive to the children; dress up the big cardboard box as an animal head, open the lid of the box, and let the children throw the bottle into the box within a certain range to "feed the animal"; decorate the bottle into a big tree on the ground, and arrange it into rows of woods according to the children's wishes. The children go around in front of and behind the trees to see who gets around more cleverly and does not touch the big tree. In the process of playing, I encourage the children to play boldly, and soon I found many games created by the children. For example, the bottles are arranged into a small river, and the children jump across; the bottles are arranged into a path, and the children run fast in it, etc.

The bottle has become a good material for children in my class to learn and explore. In the activity of playing with bottles, I have become closer to the parents, and it is easier and more thorough to understand the children. More importantly, in the process of playing with bottles, the children have gained a happy emotional experience.

(Author's unit: No. 1 Kindergarten, Jinzhou District, Dalian City, Liaoning Province)

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