5.5: Common Activities

Many types of activities are commonly used when planning activities for young children. It is crucial to strike a balance between child-initiated and teacher-directed activities. Ideally, there should be more child-initiated activities available. Activities planned for children will often target skills from multiple learning domains. The following examples are listed from more child-initiated to more teacher-directed activities.

• Sensory Exploration: Activities that engage the senses to help children investigate materials, regulate emotions, and build cognitive and language skills. Children explore a “sensory box” filled with textured objects, describing what they feel without looking.
• Exploratory Play: Children choose materials and engage in self-directed play, discovering properties and relationships through trial and error. This type of play fosters curiosity, independence, and intrinsic motivation. A child explores a water table with cups, funnels, and boats, learning about volume and buoyancy without specific teacher direction.
• Dramatic Play: Children engage in pretend scenarios that support role-playing, empathy, communication, and storytelling. In a pretend doctor’s office, children take turns being the doctor, patient, and nurse, using props to create a realistic play experience.
• Hands-On Manipulatives: Using tangible materials to explore concepts, especially math, science, and spatial reasoning. Children use pattern blocks to create and extend a repeating pattern.
• Open-Ended Art: Children create with no set outcome, which supports creative expression and process-focused learning. Given paper, glue, and recyclables, children build their own robots using their imagination and problem-solving skills.
• Outdoor and Nature-Based Learning: Children learn through physical interaction with their environment, fostering exploration, sensory awareness, and gross motor development. Children collect sticks and leaves to build a “fairy house” outdoors, applying creativity and spatial awareness.
• Music and Movement: Activities that use rhythm, movement, and song to build motor skills, auditory processing, and expressive abilities. Children jump and move to a drum beat, stopping and starting with cues, developing coordination and listening skills.
• Scientific Inquiry/Experimentation: Hands-on learning experiences where children form hypotheses, test ideas, and observe results. Children hypothesize whether an object will sink or float, test their ideas in water, and discuss their findings.
• Problem-Solving Activities: Children are challenged and work individually or collaboratively to find solutions. Builds cognitive flexibility and persistence. “How can we build a bridge between these two chairs using only blocks and cardboard?” Children test and revise their ideas.
• Storytelling and Shared Reading: Literacy-rich experiences where children listen, respond, and interact with stories to build vocabulary and narrative understanding. During a read-aloud, the teacher pauses to ask, “What might happen next?” and encourages children to retell the story afterward.
• Guided Discovery: The teacher provides structured opportunities for children to explore, offering intentional guidance through questioning or prompting. Encourages active engagement and critical thinking. A teacher asks, “What do you notice when we mix red and blue paint?” and lets the children experiment to discover the properties of color mixing.
• Discussions: Verbal exchanges between children and/or the teacher that develop reasoning, reflection, and communication skills. After a group activity, children share what worked, what was hard, and what they would do differently next time.
• Demonstration: The teacher models a concept or skill, allowing children to observe and prepare them to try it themselves. A teacher demonstrates how to properly use scissors properly, showing safe technique and grip before children try cutting paper.
• Direct Instruction: Teacher-led, explicit teaching of a concept or skill. Often brief, used when clarity and structure are needed. A teacher introduces the letter “M” by showing how it’s written, its sound, and examples of words that start with it.