Experience Instructions - Seek and Hide

Tune In

Take the children to your outdoor space and play a game of hide-and-seek. Start with an educator doing the seeking and encourage the children to hide. Make sure to run through the rules and identify the boundary of the space (e.g., you can’t go back inside the room or outside the fence). To speed the game up, when a child is found, they can join the educator in seeking!

When everyone has been found, ask the children about their hiding spots. Where were the best hiding spots? Did they see someone else find a really good spot? Explain that Hide and Seek is a really fun way to explore our outdoor space.

Gather the children together and explain that you are going to introduce them to a new game called ‘Seek and Hide.’

Find Out

Explain to the children that ‘Hide and Seek’ is about finding things that are hidden away and bringing them out into the open, but ‘Seek and Hide’ is about finding things out of place and putting them back where they belong.

Point out to the children that there is a lot of equipment for them to use and play with in the classroom and that everything has a special home. This is so that items are safely out of the way and so that people can easily find them again when we need them.

Invite the children to walk around the room and look at what is available to them and how things are sorted/organised. Encourage them to keep their hands behind their backs (or on top of their heads!) and not touch anything. Return to the carpet and ask the children to share their observations.

What did they see?
Where were things kept?

Point out any areas or storage organisation that the children may have missed on their walk or any labels you have that might help them.

Take Action

Introduce the game ‘Seek and Hide’. Show the children that you have a box of many different items from all around the room and explain that you need their help putting everything back in their homes.

Invite a child to the front of the room and ask them to choose an item from the box and describe what it is to the class. Work together as a group to identify where this item belongs, and then ask the child at the front of the room to go and put it back in its home. Explain that this game is not about speed but more about the correct placement of an item so they can take their time to think things through carefully.

Celebrate each child's efforts and use each opportunity to give the children additional information about the placement of the item. For example, ‘Yes, the trolley is where the water bottles go. Make sure the top is closed so it doesn’t spill.’ Use this opportunity to also mention any safety measures you have when putting things away, such as how to hold a pair of scissors.

Depending on your children, you could either invite them to the front of the room one at a time to retrieve an item, discuss it with the group, and put it away, or you could line the children up to choose an item one at a time and confirm where it goes before returning the item. Continue to play the game, making sure each child has a turn to ‘hide’ an item until everything is returned to its place.

This can be a great end-of-day procedure to incorporate into your routine. Now the children know the game, you can play 'seek and hide' and they can find out-of-place items and return them to their home.

Building Belonging: Seek and Hide

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