Preparing children for school, what you can keep doing at home.
With current lockdowns and some children staying at home while others are continuing care as normal, we have been receiving questions from parents as to what they can be doing at home to help in preparing children for school.
There are lots of fun and easy activities to do at home on the days that your child isn’t in care!
Reading
Read to your children everyday! Allow your child to choose the book.
When reading get your child to recognise words by pointing out the letter in which the word starts with and sounding it out. Children learn to read through recognising words. Choose age appropriate books with easy to understand story lines and different concepts. Allow your child to ask questions or initiate some questions at the end of the book.
Play
Provide opportunities for your child to experience different play styles e.g. imaginative, sensory, constructive and symbolic. Some ideas could be is creating a forte, kitchen play, blocks, dress-ups. Model the language for each activity e.g. play kitchen – talk about what you would cook, ingredients, method.
Fine Motor
Lets get crafty! Activities such as cutting and pasting, drawing, painting, practicing writing their name and play doh. Play doh can be easily made at home and is great to increase finger strength.
Social Skills
While social skills in lockdown can be tricky to build. There are some fun ways that you can do this at home. Board games are a great way to take turns, share and create ‘team spirit’. It also builds patience and resilience. Instead of putting lunch and snacks on plates, put all daily snacks and lunch into a lunchbox similar to what they would take to school. Let them open all packaging. Break the day up into activities similar to a school day!
We hope this provides a few tasks to help over the next few weeks. Our centres do have COVID safe practices and action plans in place and our aim is to provide a high quality and safe program during these unprecedented times.
