He has a red, red coat
and a red, red hat.
His boots are black
and he carries a sack.
He has a twinkle in his eye
and a friendly smile.
And his name is Santa Claus.
He has red red pants
And red gloves on his hands
He has a twinkle in his eye
and a friendly smile.
And his name is Santa Claus.
(by Claire Hadjinikolaou, English teacher in Athens school)
Some times it takes just a balloon to keeps babies happy. Just hang it from the roof and let them play with it!
(by Anastasia Kouroubali, teacher in babies’ class in Athens)
“Let’s play basketball” someone said… And so, kindergarten kids just constructed a pop up basket from used tires!
They arranged by themselves a shooting order and patiently waited for their turn. They were little puzzled about how to get the ball out of this basket and needed to come up with some original solutions.
Through this spontaneous yard play, kindergarten children accomplished a bunch of educational milestones by themselves, just being based on pleasure and joy! Priceless….
(by Ioanna Eleftheriou & Stavroula Gaoutsi, teachers in our Athens kindergarten)
Babies in preschool love playing with life-derived loose parts! Fantastic sensory play with messy stuff, assisting them to discover the world.
(by Maria Gryllaki, teacher in babies class in Athens)
(video by Claire Hadjinicolaou, English teacher in Athens)
Babies enjoy playing with small pasta pieces, at the sensory table. However, they thought that the light yellow color of the pasta is a little dull and wanted to change it. But the question was, “how”?
First, we picked our favorite liquid color and dropped it into little bags, together with the pasta pieces. To have a big success, we dropped a looooot of color!
Then, we shook the bags. Babies observed that pasta pieces soon started to disappear! Babies tried then to identify the new content of the bags, by using all their senses.
The colorful pasta bags were magically transformed into our new “sensory bags”! A new toy that we added in our class play equipment.
A toy, made by babies themselves!
(by Maria Gryllaki, teacher in babies’ class in Athens)
Life-derived Learning 