If you are home schooling your children, keeping them entertained and active, while also stimulating their brains is a big job, but there are some creative tips to help.
Education expert and former primary school teacher, Becky Cranham, of PlanBee, has some great ways to embed learning in fun activities, including:
- What’s cooking?: Baking provides a wealth of learning opportunities– and produces delicious results! Working through a simple recipe with your child will help develop measuring skills (maths), following instructions (English) and can help them understand reversible and irreversible changes (science).
- Nurture nature: Planting seeds and watching them sprout and grow is always rewarding. And you don’t need a garden. Pop some multi-purpose compost in a plant pot, plastic cup or old yogurt pot, sprinkle the seeds in and cover with compost.Encourage your child to take responsibility for making sure the plant has enough water and sunlight and challenge them to record what happens to the seed each day.
- Keep them moving: YouTube is an endless source of great exercise and dance videos for young children, including Dance n’ Beat for fun dance routines, Cosmic Kids Yoga to tie them in knots, and Jump Start Jonny, offering free, high-energy workouts.
- Code with confidence: This is much easier than it may sound. One of our favourites is Scratch. Children can program their own interactive stories, games and animations, while learning key skills along the way.
- Telling a story: Ask children to pick a main character, a setting and a special object and let their imaginations run riot. To present them to the world too, they could stick with the good old traditional pen and paper or try creating an eBook. Book Creator is a great free app.
- Keep reading: Check out Epic, which has access to 35,000 children’s books, learning videos, quizzes and more. You can try it free for 30 days. Encourage your child to act out the finished story or create a puppet show.