Opposites

[Guest DeborahF]

I've been asked to help a nursery plan for an "Opposites" topic after Christmas. I've done a forum search already but not a lot has come up. I sat down and listed all the opposites I can think of, which has sparked off a few ideas, but I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for activities/resources that I could link in that have really worked well?

[Marion]

In the past we have done things like day/night.........we did animals that come out at night and in the day

light/dark some good art work mixing different shades and tones also we did shadow puppets and some relief pictures using simple black shapes against light coloured backgrounds

big/small we used the story of Jack and the beanstalk

and had things that might belong to Jack and the giant and lots of discriptive words to describe size

fast/slow one of the things we did was using a sand timer and seeing how many times the children could write their name in one minute how many times they could jump and how many apples they could colour in on the tree and count.

[Guest]

Just came upon this rhyme:

 

Playing opposites

 

If I say big,

Will you say small?

If I say short,

Will you say tall?

 

If I say fast,

Will you say slow?

If I say high,

Will you say low?

 

If I say left,

Will you say right?

If I say day,

Will you say night?

[Guest]

Off the top of my head these books might be useful:

 

'Big Bear, Small Bear' by The Berenstains. The bears get everything muddled up e.g. the big bear puts on the small swimming costume and vice versa

 

'Dinosaur Roar' by Henrietta and Paul Stickland (dinosaur roar, dinosaur squeak, dinosaur fierce, dinosaur meek)

[Helen]

Hi,

We've done some activities based on opposites recently:

* Happy/sad faces : making biscuits and icing them, making faces on paper plates with spaghetti for the features, hand puppets

*Using the books "Where's my teddy?" and "Can't you sleep little bear?"we made lots of things that were big/small with playdough, clay, etc

*Hot and cold weather: using clothes to dress dolls, bears, etc Ice in the water tray (limit the time because their fingers WILL go blue!!)

* Lots of music with loud and quiet, slow and fast, long notes and short notes. Sing familiar songs in different ways.

*Movement activities: high/low, stamping/fairy steps, fast/slow, up/down (eg Grand Old Duke of York)

* Black and white pics: stripy zebras, pandas, photocopy children's faces for collage work.