This Playgroup Week (17-23 March 2025), Little Scientists is highlighting the importance of playgroups in supporting children and their families explore STEM in a collaborative way. If you’re a playgroup coordinator, educator, or volunteer, you play a key role in making the playgroup a success. Foster a space where children and families can explore their own interests, rather than following structured activities with one “right” way to play. This fosters more inquiry-based learning, greater creativity, and STEM discovery!
This year’s Playgroup Week theme is “Celebrating the power of playgroups”. There’s lots to celebrate! For example, playgroups:
🧠 Are often children’s and families’ first experience with early childhood education.
👪 Introduce families to the wonder of play-based learning and how easy it is to support STEM learning.
💚 Provide families with a safe space to seek support and learn from each other.
Read on for ideas on how playgroups (and other early learning contexts) can support families to develop children’s early STEM skills. Did you know we have an Early STEM Educators Network on Facebook? We invite playgroup educators, coordinators, and volunteers to join us as we discuss all things early STEM. We’d love to hear about the STEM experiences you offer at your playgroups!
Make the most of open-ended materials
Playgroups are often the first place that children have access to a wide range of materials, so they can engage deeply with self-led experimentation and explore unfamiliar items. If you’re coordinating or supporting a playgroup, you can make the most of this with a few ideas:
🪀 Build a materials buffet that includes recycled, natural, and open-ended items. Often, the less a toy or play material does, the more it extends children’s play as they become curious about the object’s properties and uses.
🪀 Invite parents to become aware of the materials they can make available at home. Playgroups are the ideal space to showcase the benefits of open-ended materials.
🪀 Emphasise that families can spot the STEM learning opportunities in their everyday routines and materials, fostering children’s curiosity and problem-solving skills.
Plan for different STEM dispositions
Offering activities that encourage collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving will support families to see children’s STEM capabilities from even the youngest age. Here are some activities that encourage these sorts of dispositions in playgroup contexts:
🧸 Sort and categorise objects to develop children’s mathematical skills. Offer families a range of materials and prompt them to sort and categorise them in different ways, for example by size, shape, habitat, texture, or colour. Materials could include a range of lids, toy animals of different species, natural materials, and blocks.
🚗 Explore gravity by building a ball run. Provide balls and long blocks, PVC pipes, or carboard tubes. Families can observe the way their children start to connect the different items to make a longer ramp for their ball, or watch as children lift or lower their ramps to make the balls go faster and slower.
✂️ Set up a makerspace area with masking tape, scissors, and recycled materials such as boxes, cardboard rolls, straws, spoons, and plastic punnets. Invite the children to build creations based off their own ideas or provide them with a design challenge. For example: “Can you build a house that the big bad wolf can’t blow down?” or “What is the tallest tower you can build with these materials?”
🧪 Set up a chemical reactions station that includes small amounts of kitchen ingredients like bicarb soda, flour, salt, water, soap, vinegar, and food dye. Children can explore what happens if they mix different materials and hypothesise about what might occur with different mixes. This opens the door to trial and error, hypothesising, and hands-on exploration.
You can find more ideas for inquiry-based STEM experiences in our free online resources.
Model STEM language
Families can feel awkward using STEM-focused language, thinking it might be too advanced for children. As a playgroup educator or volunteer, you can model what this language might look like to help parents see how easily children respond to and feel comfortable using it themselves.
STEM-focused language includes words that extend the process of scientific inquiry such as “experiment”, “hypothesis” and “results”. It can also include words that help describe something, such as by colour, shape, texture, temperature, or size. In addition, STEM language can involve questions that help children think about what they have observed or done using descriptive language.
Here are example sentences with STEM-focused language that you can introduce to families:
💬 “What’s your idea? I’d love to hear your hypothesis about what will happen.”
💬 “That ramp is longer than the other one! But this one is wider, isn’t it?”
💬 “Are you going to experiment with what happens if you mix salt with water? I can’t wait to see what your results will be.”
Develop your STEM skills with pedagogy-based STEM PD:
- Browse our in-person STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM Hours.
- Book an in-service workshop for your team.
- Book a STEM Family Workshop for your families.
