Eyfs Early Years Pre-school Maths Science Planning Ideas – The Princess and The Pea

Fairy Tales like the Princess and the Pea are great topic themes for EYFS Early Years and pre-school but many teachers and practitioners find it hard to plan outside of the obvious learning area of literacy.

We have been covering the Princess and the Pea in our Early Years unit recently and have extended the children’s learning into other areas like knowledge and understanding of the world (KUW) and Problem solving, reasoning and number (PSRN). For those of you who are not familiar with the EYFS the latter area is basically mathematics or math.

Ideas for Science, knowledge and understanding of the world

Exploring and investigating peas in a pod

Give the children some pea pods to explore and investigate. Sugar snap peas are ideal for this as the pod and the peas are edible. Encourage discussion around taste, smell and ask them to describe what they see. Ask them to predict what they think may be inside – don’t tell them.

Freezing and melting peas

Give children the opportunity to investigate frozen peas in a tray. To save on resources, keep the peas and freeze them in extra water for the following day. Freeze them in different sized and shaped containers and have the children guess which block of peas may defrost the fastest. Ask them what the reasons are behind their thinking and make a simple chart to record their predictions.

The Queen’s Pea

Freeze a dried pea inside a tray of ice cubes – one pea in each compartment. Give the children a cube to look after and see who can make their cube last the longest before it melts. This will evoke discussion on how to keep the ice from melting. Some children will suggest putting it in the fridge or freezer but tell them that the Queen’s freezer/fridge is broken and we must find other ways to keep the ice frozen.

Investigating variety

The Queen had lots of different peas in her kitchen. Explore different types of peas. – Tinned, processed, mushy, dried, frozen and fresh. This makes an excellent comparison activity and leads to discussions on how they are stored – in bags, tins and in the fridge or freezer.

Pea sculpture and malleable activities

Make a mixture of different sorts of peas. Mushy peas are very good for binding the other peas together and the children can get really messy by moulding, squishing and shaping the peas to make different shapes.