Early Years Foundation Stage
Fostering the Characteristics of Effective Learning
Moti-Lab is a pop up laboratory for experiential and sensory learning right across EYFS. The magnetic gutters, wheels and switches can be used with water, balls or anything else that flows for a whole host of learning.
Moti-Lab is an open-ended resource, there are no right and wrong ways to approach the tasks so they can only be done by having a go and experimenting.
The practical nature of Moti-Lab means it fosters all the Characteristics of effective learning in EYFS.
Playing and Exploring
Children can use their natural curiosity to explore the system and engage in the open ended activities. Children take active and involving roles with their peers. Children can lead the activities and explore outcomes through trial and error.
Active Learning
Moti-Lab is really engaging – what kids don’t like to play with water and magnets? This engagement translates into focus and concentration on the activities. It allows them to figure out problems for themselves adopting different approaches to challenges and developing persistence.
Although all children will get some amazing learning from engaging with Moti-Lab, it’s multi-sensory nature particularly favours those harder to reach children with behavioural issues and those with SEND.
The practical nature is also great for improving fine and gross motor skills.
Thinking Critically and Creatively
Problem solving is the essence of Moti-Lab and all the problems can be solved in different ways. This allows children to make predictions, plan and test them change strategy when required to find “their” best way to solve an activity.
Communication and Teamwork
Moti-Lab can be used individually or with up to 8 children at a time. With multiple users it really comes into its own. The collaborative nature of the tasks promotes great teamwork and foster communication as the children decide how they can complete the activities together. We’ve seen some amazing outcomes with children who are ‘harder to reach’ or have communicative problems whether that be language barriers or SEN. These activities are great for personal development and can be used to encourage talking, listening, turn taking and other communication.
Using Your Existing Resources
Augment your Moti-lab and increase the fun and learning by adding resources you already have. The children can introduce existing watering cans and jugs, bubbles, balls, boats and whatever else to enhance their creative play. Bring in food colouring to investigate primary and secondary colours, add sand or other messy play items to increase the sensory benefits.
Teaching Resources and CPD
At Moti-Lab we want to engage teachers and practitioners to maximise make learning with Moti-Lab fun, accessible and effective. We will be supporting teachers through videos of experiments and activities– these can be accessed at anytime saving precious time on preparation.
We also want practitioners to become involved in the Moti-Lab concept. It’s open ended nature means that teachers are able to innovate with what they can use Moti-Lab to teach.
Practitioners are in a best position to judge what is effective and can come up with their own lesson ideas for Moti-Lab and you can be sure that we will share these freely with other Moti-Lab users.
How science week changed my life!
I grew up in the 80s and my experience of science in primary school was scarce, I recall less than a handful of experiments, the most memorable one was a blindfold tasting experiment to study [...]
ASE Conference North – Inclusion in Science Education
Could STEM be the best vehicle for Inclusion? It was an exciting day for Moti-Lab on the 11th of November with our first ‘proper’ exhibition taking place at the Association for Science Education (The [...]
Moti-Lab announces investment from Young Foundation
It’s been a long road but we’ve finally found the right founders for Moti-Lab. We are proud to announce that we have now received social impact investment from The Young Foundation. Having gone through [...]
Finding that funding fit
As with all new businesses and entrepreneurial activity the biggest hurdle to start a project like ours is finding the finance necessary to go from idea to reality. Back in 2012 the idea for Moti-Lab [...]