Afternoon activity ideas and guidance

 

Communication and Language and Being imaginative

During times when children aren’t doing structured activities (ie. Maths, English etc), is a prime opportunity for children to learn through play. Whilst playing, we try to help the children to develop their language skills and to play imaginatively. Try encouraging your child to act out a narrative with their toys to create a story of their own by modelling the language you would expect them to use and joining in with their play. For example, if you child is playing with a farm set use the farmer to introduce a problem, i.e ‘Oh no, the cows have all escaped. How can we save them?’ and encourage your child to play along with the other characters.

You can also support their language development by correcting mistakes in their language as they speak. For example if you child says ‘I hearded a noise’ repeat back ‘Yes, you heard a noise.’

 

Physical development

There are lots of different areas within physical development that you can support you child with at home. Below are some ideas that you can try whilst your child is at home:

• Scissor skills. Through craft activities, encourage your child to use scissors with good control. Ensure they always hold their scissors correctly, with their thumb at the top.
• Fine motor skills. Encourage children to use their fingers and thumbs to pick up small objects and manipulate them with good control. For example, using pegs or tweezers to pick things up, treading beads or blocks onto string, knitting, sewing, planting seeds, playing tiddly-winks, hole punching, making bracelets.
• Pencil control. Encourage the children to draw patterns and shapes with different implements (pens, pencils, paint brushes) and practice correct cursive letter formation.
• Gross motor skills. This is the ‘PE’ part of our curriculum. Encourage the children to practice throwing and catching balls with accuracy (i.e throwing into a target), rolling on the floor to develop core strength, yoga (there are lots of videos of children’s yoga on youtube), balancing/walking a line, climbing and hop scotch. They can also help with more ‘heavy’ jobs around the house, such as cleaning patios and scrubbing floors.

If you are on facebook or the internet, there are lots of people out there who are producing free resources in this area, such as:

• The PE shed
• The body coach

 

 

Creative activities

A lot of the creative activities we do in the class are based on our current topic which changes from week to week (please see the weekly planning for our current topic).  We include some creative activities in our planning, but feel free to include any addition craft activities that your child likes to do too. We love seeing things that the children have made on Class Dojo!

 

Understanding the World

This area of our curriculum is all about understanding the world around us and has three sections:

• People and communities, which involves learning about different jobs, religions and cultures and taking part in family activities.
• The world, which incorporates lots of basic scientific understanding such as features and changes in the environment (growth and seasons etc) and thinking about how the world has changed through time.
• Technology, which means being able to use simple age appropriate computer programs to do things such as play games, take photos, etc.

Ideas for you to try could include:

• Planting a seed and watching it grow and talking about the changes that they see and what a plant needs to grow big and strong.
• Drawing a picture of a flower and labelling the parts if they are able to.
• Researching and reading stories about different times in history.
• Thinking about or watching videos about farms and how they work and talking about where food comes from.
• Matching baby animals with their grown-ups.
• Start a compost bin and talk about how they work and why they are used.
• Help to recycle more around the house and think about how we can waste less.
• Explore floating and sinking.