In Shrinking Mouse by Pat Hutchins (Red Fox, 4.99), a group of animals learn how places and objects can appear larger or smaller depending on how close they are to you. Perspective is a fascinating concept for young children to explore, even though it is hard to understand.
The story deals with the idea in a simple and enjoyable way, and its particular strength lies in the way that the characters learn about perspective through first-hand experience as they move across a landscape of fields and woods.
You can share the story with the children in your setting and provide activities that will enable them to consolidate their learning and reflect on their own experience.
Compare and contrast
Plan simple activities that encourage the children to pair or order objects according to size.
Good practice
* Place pairs of socks of various sizes in a small basket and position on a low shelf. Encourage the children to unravel the socks and order them by length, from the shortest to the longest and vice versa. Model the correct mathematical language.
* Hide strips of satin ribbon of varying lengths in the sand tray. Ask the children to search for the ribbons, lay them on a flat surface and order the ribbons from longest to shortest and vice versa. Model vocabulary to describe what the children do throughout the activity.
* Provide play dough and encourage children to mould sausages of different lengths. Ask them to create small balls of dough in the palms of their hands, to place the balls on the table and to roll them with their fingers, moving backwards and forwards, and moulding them into long sausage shapes.
Provide plastic toy knives for slicing the sausages. Ask the children to compare the lengths of the sausages that they have made and to put them in order of length. Encourage them to chat as they work at the table, and introduce the comparative words that will enable them to describe what they are doing.
* In all these activities, draw children's attention to other aspects of comparison. For example, the children may notice that the objects vary in overall size as well as in length. Model the appropriate vocabulary.
In close-up
When children are confident comparing the lengths and sizes of tangible objects, encourage them to experiment with magnifying glasses to challenge their expectations of how things should appear.
Good practice
Provide a selection of magnifying glasses of different sizes and objects with interesting details. For example:
* Seashells investigated at this close range reveal bumps and crevices, as well as finer shades of colour.
* African violets and 'lamb's ear' plants are soft and velvety to touch and the magnifying glasses will reveal the fine layers of hairs that cover the surface of their leaves.
* Encourage the children to look at their hands - at the pores, the hairs on the back of the hand, and the lines and creases on the palms.
* Support the children by modelling the vocabulary needed to describe the observations as they make them.
In position
Most three- and four-year-old children enjoy playing with small-scale toys that represent real objects, such as train sets, plastic zoo animals, model farms and dolls' houses. Children enter with ease an imaginative arena where they give life and character to these miniature toys. You can plan small-world play to develop children's awareness of distance and personal perception.
Good practice
* Set up a model farmyard. Encourage the children to place the horses in the stable, the pigs in the pigsty, the hens in the coop, the cows in the cattle shed and the sheep in the field. Ask the children what each of the animals will be able to see from the position they occupy on the farm. Use open-ended questions that encourage the children to put themselves in the position of each animal. For example: What does the grey horse see when he looks out of the stable? What do the sheep see from the end of the field? What does the farmer see from his farmhouse window?
* With the train set, help children build a track that includes tunnels and viaducts and create space for farms, fields, small villages and stations.
Use small-scale model people to drive and travel on the train. Encourage the children to stop the train at stations, to board passengers and load cargo on to wagons. Invite them to bend down to the level of the train and to say what the passengers can see from the carriages. Children are surprisingly capable at perceiving detail that adults fail to notice, and they enjoy the challenge of inventing scenes that may lie ahead of the train.
Long distance
Organise outdoor experiments to challenge the children to consider how they perceive objects at a distance.
Good practice
* Provide helium-filled balloons. Tie each one to a long piece of string or wool, and create a loop at the other end to fit around a child's hand.
Observe them as they rise and as the children pull them back down. Close up, the balloons will appear large, but as they rise through the air they will appear to grow smaller and smaller. As the balloons are pulled back down, children will see that they return to the size they originally perceived.
* Line up some bicycles along a fence or wall at either end of the outdoor area. Ask the children to stand beside one row and to comment on the two sets. Ask questions such as: Tell me about the bikes at the other end of the playground? Are they bigger or smaller? Why do you think that? Ask some children to ride over to the far row of bicycles to check if they are bigger or smaller than those they are riding. They should then ride back and swap with the children waiting.
* Remind the children about the animals in the story and how they travelled backwards and forwards from one wood to another across the fields. Support the children in devising their own stories based on these events in the book.
PROJECT GUIDE
This project recognises that:
* settings should be constantly resourced and organised in such a way as to offer learning opportunities across all areas of the Foundation Stage curriculum
* topics can enhance basic provision and respond to children's interests
* children need plenty of first-hand experiences and time to develop ideas, skills and concepts through play.
When using the project, practitioners should recognise that:
* activities should be offered and never imposed on children
* the learning, planned or unplanned, that takes place is valid
* the process is valuable and should not be undermined by an overemphasis on outcomes.
READER OFFER
* We have ten copies of Shrinking Mouse by Pat Hutchins (Red Fox, 4.99) to give away to Nursery World readers. Send your name and address on the back of a postcard or envelope, marked 'Shrinking Mouse', to the address on page 3. Winners will be the first ten names drawn on 12 June.
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