My Body

(non-screen ideas)

General

• Draw around your bodies. If you have paper you could stick some together. Outside you could do this with chalk or water. Then decorate the inside with paint/colours/natural resources
• Lie down and let a grown up go around your body with blocks, straws, sticks, leaves etc
• Label parts of the body. Do you know where your chin is? Your forehead? Your elbow/
• Make skeletons with straws or sticks
• Measure your body with a tape measure. Or with blocks or handprints etc. How many blocks long are you?
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My face 

• Look carefully at your face in a mirror and draw what you see. Add details. (Once your child has finished ask them to look again to see eyelashes/hair/eyebrows etc and keep adding. Keep coming back to the picture to find more details until it is finished)
• Make faces with natural resources outside
• Use pictures of features from magazines and old books. Cut them out and make a funny face! Stick them onto stones and make faces this way
• Use a face template and add features with pens and pencils, or use buttons, playdough etc
• Make Mr Potato head! Stick features onto a potato
• Give faces to household objects such as laundry baskets, bins etc
• Look in the mirror and pull funny faces! Take photos of funny faces and talk about them.
• Use pictures of faces or faces in stories to talk about feelings. How is this person feeling? How do you know? Show different emotions with your face and take photos. Show angry/happy/sad/excited/worried. If you can print these you could make a book
• Make faces with food on a plate. Then eat it!
• Send pictures of your face to me to put on the website. Let’s see if your friends can guess who it is!
• Look at photos of your face when you were a baby. How has your face changed?

My senses

Listening 👂

Listening is a really important skill for young children to develop, especially in terms of their reading and phonics. They need to be able to hear sounds in order to put them together and say the word or read

• Go on a listening walk. What sounds do you hear? Stop and listen. When you get home can you remember what you heard?
• Listen to different sounds in your house or outside your window
• Play a whisper game-whisper something silly to each other-what was said?
• Hide different instruments or household objects behind a screen or curtain and make a sound with them. What was it? How do you know? What does it sound like?
• Make slime or other sensory stuff. If you can’t get the ingredients for slime use cornflour and water for a new sensory experience

Lots of other sensory ideas here

 https://inclusiveteach.com/2020/03/20/150-sensory-learning-ideas/

• Make a basket or box with lots of different textures into rub or feel
• Make your own musical instruments with plastic bottles. Add rice/cereal/pasta etc and talk about the different sounds they make.

(look on the “screen ideas” page for listening games)

Touching 🖐️

• Put different items in a feely bag and see if you can say what they are by touch alone. What does it feel like? How do you know it’s…?
• Describe things by the way they feel. Is it rough/smooth? hard/soft? bumpy? spiky?
• Put out different cereals and dry food to play with and talk about how they feel

Tasting 😋

• Wear a blindfold and taste different foods. What is it? How do you know?
• Talk about your food as you eat it. What does it taste like? What does it taste the same as? (Introduce words like sweet, sour, dry, spicy, bland and say what they mean)

Seeing 👀

• Look around you. What do you see? What do you notice?
• On a walk look out for different things. A yellow car. A blue door. Make a list of the things you are going to try and spot before you go. Or do this on the garden (this heightens observational skills)
• Draw a close up picture of your eye. Look at all the detail

Smelling 👃

• Put on a blindfold and smell different things. Can you tell what it is?
• Put out spices etc. Smell the different ones. Put some on a tray and draw in them
• Add different scents to play dough
• Add different smells to your bath and smell the bubbles
• Make home made bath bombs

https://www.redtedart.com/bath-bombs-recipe-gifts-kids-can-make/

• Make perfume from flower petals and water
• On a walk smell different flowers and leaves

Let’s move! 🕺🏃🏼‍♀️🤸

Movement and physical activity is so important for our youngest children

• Try some yoga. Yoga is really good for core strength which in some young children is not yet developed. It’s also great for holding balances, and for relaxing
• Move around in different ways. Hop, skip, jump, stamp
• Make movement cards, adding parts of the body. Pick a card and do what it says on the card eg circle your arms, stamp your feet, stand on one leg, touch your nose
• On a walk or in the garden or house play “How shall I travel?” Make cards which say fast/slow/jump/skip etc and pick one out