Active Home Learning Ideas & Learning Through Play Opportunities

Below is a selection of ideas to consider for your child during this period of school closures. We are not suggesting you HAVE to do these things, but we are offering them as suggestions in case you run out of your own ideas! Also, keep an eye out for more fun ideas uploaded on our app daily.

You can also keep in touch with us through your child’s learning journal. Why not upload photos and comments about a challenge your child has completed, or share with us something that your child has been doing/exploring within their own free play, or maybe just a photo of family event you have all enjoyed. We can’t wait to see what exciting things you have all been doing from home.

Top Tips

• Remember all children are different and have their own likes, dislikes, interests, and own timetable of development.

• Children respond readily to routine and at present their daily/weekly routine is going to be different. Try to establish a daily routine around mealtimes, play times and rest times.

• Offer the challenges and play ideas only for as long as it is enjoyable for your child – this might only be for 15 minutes or less for most of these activities and you can always go back to them at any time.

• Allow lots of opportunity for your child to enjoy free play with their own toys, following their own interests and use this opportunity to observe what motivates your child and consider different ways you could develop their own interests.

Communication & Language

Read aloud to your child in your home language – encourage your child to choose the book, join in with a familiar story, hold the book themselves, turn the pages themselves, make up the story/retell the story by looking at the pictures.

Spend some time saying rhymes together/sing songs – revisit old favourites, listen to some familiar ones online, learn some new ones, action rhymes are usually the most engaging for our children

Make up a story together, write down the story as your child tells it to you, if they would like to draw their story encourage and support their mark making by writing simple captions for their pictures. Maybe they could share their story with other family members

Make a card to send to a relative or friend

Health & Well Being

Allow your child to help you prepare their snacks and meals, washing and preparing fruit or veg, spreading their own butter, serving out portions, pouring own drinks, washing up their own plate, cup and cutlery

Encourage your child to think about what you might need from the shops, gather their thoughts on what they would like to eat and write down their ideas and support them to find the products at the shops

Have them help you clean, dust, sweep, tidy the house!

Help to wash the car or their bike/scooter

Help to tidy up the garden/water house plants/feed pets/plant seeds/feed birds

Have a daily local walk/cycle/scooter or visit local park for fresh air and exercise (if we can!)

Check out the Cosmic Yoga & Go Noodle on Youtube – fun interactive video clips

Numeracy & Mathematics

Support them to sort out clothes for washing, organising items by colour for the machine, matching socks, fold clothes, put items away in the right place

Play family games such a snap, bingo, snakes and ladders

Look out for opportunities to count amounts, spot/say or read numbers on signs when out and about on doors/buses (if we can go outside!)

Baking opportunities to explore size, amount and weight

Water play exploring items which float/sink, fill containers different amounts using different sized spoons

Expressive Arts

Listening to music, dancing and playing party games such as musical bumps, musical statues

Use water and different brushes such as decorator’s brushes/rollers, old toothbrushes/scrubbing brushes for mark making on outside paths and walls

Offer opportunities to cut and stick with paper and fabric

Use cardboard boxes, tubes, packaging to make models

Use pots and pans to create drums to play along with different types of music

Make Playdough – use different shaped jars, tubs and boxes as cutters – add stones, sticks to add decoration