Potatoes – Aren’t They Great?

This week we learned about potatoes. Aren’t they just amazing?! You can use them for so many activities (everything from science to painting) and in so many dishes!

Here are some suggestions of activities that involve potatoes:
· Get a raw potato and a boiled one. The children need to use their senses to find differences and similarities between them: they can smell them, touch them, weigh them, taste them, try to peel them, cut them to see what the inside feels like, etc. You can do this with sweet potatoes too.
· Talk about potatoes in general, where they come from, where they grow, how we eat them, what they look like.
· You can grow a potato: try this sweet potato experiment – it’s very easy to set up, and very educational.
· You can play a version of “Hot potato”, the popular party game: the children gather in a circle and pass the potato to each other while music plays. When the music stops, the player who has the potato in his hand needs to put one knee on the floor. The game continues as before. If the same player has the potato twice, then he needs to put the other knee on the floor too. Then an elbow/a hand. After that, the player is eliminated. Play this game until it is fun for the kids.
· Paint with potatoes. You can easily paint owls by cutting a potato in half, then cutting a small triangle from one side, so it looks like the ears of an owl. Apples, pumpkins, jack o’lanterns are also very easy to paint using potato stamps.
· Sing “1 Potato, 2 Potatoes” from Super Simple Learning – it’s the perfect song for very young learners. You can also use it to introduce plurals. I made these potatoes to teach the song (I didn’t have the time to make them with the kids, but I would have done that), practice counting, and play some games.

First, we sang the song while counting the potatoes and putting them in the basket. Then, each child got one potato and a number, and they had to place their potatoes in the basket while I sang the song. Then, just for fun, I hid all potatoes throughout the room, while they had their eyes shut, then they went searching for them. They never get bored with hiding games!

I will try to add more ideas soon, but now I’m off to bed. I’m very tired and tomorrow I have to be well-rested: I’ll take the kids to the forest. 🙂