Kindergarten Activity- Exploring Positional Words

While this kindergarten activity may simply look like blowing water around a blue plastic block, it is so much more than that. This kindergarten activity explores what will happen when you blow an object from various areas around the object. Each of those areas represents a positional words that kids in kindergarten need to learn. During this activity you can talk about the words above, below and under, beside, and behind. As you talked about each word and what it means, a child or children will blow a plastic straw from that position.

At my house we took the opportunity to talk about how much the blue plastic block moved from each position. We found that some straw blowing positions made the block move a lot more than others. I found that there was one position in particular that my son like the best and seemed to blow the hardest from. I bet as you look through the pictures in this post you will be able to figure out what position that was.

Putting This Kindergarten Activity Together

You will need the following supplies to put this activity together:

Plastic toy
Turkey roasting pan
Plastic straw

Optional: Positional words written on index cards. We didn’t do this but, it would make this a reading activity too.

Creating Your Learning Space

Fill the turkey roasting pan with water. You will want to make sure that you have enough water in the roasting pan for the object to move freely when it is hit with the breeze from the straw.

Place the object in the turkey roasting plan and you are ready to go.

Exploring Positional Words

Depending on how much experience your child or children have with positional words, you may want to review what the words mean before you start the activity. If you would rather jump right into the activity, you can select one positional word at a time and have your child or children test out that blowing position in the roasting pan.

As they are testing each position out, you can talk about how much the object moves when you blow the straw from that position. Know that some children may blower harder or softer just to see what happens. My son loved seeing the water fill with bubbles when he blew the straw under the block with great vigor. He also loved blowing the straw beside the blue block under the water rather than above it.

Some kids may try to test out all the positional words except above from beneath the water because they will love to see the water bubble. You can guide them back to focusing on distance the object you have selected moved or stick to exploring the meaning of the positional words. This kindergarten activity can be as flexible or focused as you want it to be.

If you want to keep it focused, you may want to leave the materials out for your children to explore later on. Of course you could put out the materials and have the children explore them before you even start this kindergarten activity. Either way I think children would love been given time to explore the materials