04/08/2026
Someone said to me "But you just play all day? How do they learn?"
Play-based education is an essential teaching approach for young children that uses free play, guided play, and active exploration to build foundational cognitive, social, and motor skills. It turns natural curiosity into meaningful learning.
What about today? We just went to a sunflower maze, right? Just a nice day out for the children? Wrong!
A morning full of opportunities to learn!
🌻 Personal, Social and Emotional:
The children worked hard at taking turns to write on the clipboard, follow the safety rules of being out and about in public, maintained attention on the task at hand, helped and supported each other by waiting for others to catch up, knowing when they were tired/hungry and asking for help, showing perseverance and resilience and understanding basic hygiene at lunch time with handwashing.
🌻 Communication and Language:
Children constantly communicating with each other about their discoveries, learning scientific terms for parts of the sunflower and pollination process
🌻 Physical:
Children literally ran round the entire maze (exhausting!) moving on uneven surfaces, fine motor skills when holding the pencil to write on their sheets, feeding themselves at lunch
🌻 Maths:
The trail was numbered, so children needed to use their number recognition skills to work out which points we visited, sooo many conversations about how tall the sunflowers were and comparing their own heights to them. The children spotted different shapes in the heads of the flowers and seed growth patterns. They followed the map beautifully for position and directional learning.
🌻 Literacy:
The children followed the signs from the carpark to the maze, read the signs in the maze to answer the questions (with support), younger ones started to recognise letters
🌻 Understanding the World:
The children spotted bees and had a conversation about pollinators and how flowers grow, discussed the life cycle of flowers, appreciation for the outdoors, sun safety!
🌻 Expressive arts and design:
The children started to recognise more colours within the flower heads - not just yellow! The children used the sunflowers to inspire their art and did some still life painting.
Tiney
