Ideas for "My Home"

• Make dens. Young children just love to den.The feeling of being enclosed and being somewhere “me-sized” is exciting and helps them to feel secure. In Nursery we have dens for our children to go and feel calm. It might be an idea to keep a den set up all the time. Send photos of your dens and what you enjoy doing in there!

• https://www.noaandnani.co.uk/den-building-ideas-for-the-best-dens-ever-i43

   

• Junk modelling.  Make a junk model of your home. You can use anything! Save cereal boxes and tubes. Use sticky tape and scissors and away you go. Decorate it and add furniture, and make little people too. Great for imaginative play and making up stories.
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• Build your home from whatever building kits you have-lego, duplo,blocks. Again add people.

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• Draw your home. Let your child create with pencils or felt tips. Talk about what the different rooms are for and what you might find in them.

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• Think about the story of the 3 little pigs. Can you make houses from sticks/?Bricks? Straw or grass?

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• Make homes for creatures in the garden. Bug hotels out of sticks and leaves, hedgehog nests from leaves. Or take toy animals out and make little homes for them with whatever you can find.

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• Give your child lots of socks and ask them to put them into pairs. Use odd ones to make sock puppets. Use the socks to measure things-how many socks long are you?

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• Make maps to your friend’s/grandparents homes
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• Give your child real kitchen equipment to do some cooking and baking. Children will cook and bake with thin air! Great for imagination. Add saucepans and spoons to bath time too, or outside with water, sand or mud. Put a sieve or colander in the bath for children to catch small objects
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• Use a baking tray and little objects for children to sort and count

• Use a colander and dried spaghetti to post through the holes

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• Garden games…hide and seek, floor is lava, large scale painting, cleaning, drawing, treasure hunts, number hunts, scavenger hunts, colour match hunts

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• Make skittles with plastic bottles filled with water. Tape numbers to them. Which numbers did you knock down?
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• Help with jobs around the home. This is brilliant, real life learning. Any type of job has physical benefits, as well as language opportunities if you talk whilst you are doing it, maths opportunities if it involves shape, counting, measuring, and emotional benefits as it gives a real sense of achievement when it is a job well done!
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• If you get the paint out-lots of kitchen utensils and household objects are great for printing and making patterns. Try old toothbrushes, forks, spoons, toilet rolls. These can also be great for making patterns in play dough

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• Play Kim’s game using household objects. Show your child some objects then cover them up. Take one away. Which one is missing? Build up the amount of objects. Great for memory!

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• Make obstacle courses inside and out

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• Make a treasure hunt, letter hunt, number hunt around the house and garden. If your child is not yet reading numbers, show them a number and ask them to find one like this. Then tell them the number.

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• Colour match and sort objects around the home
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• Give your child some loose parts. This could be anything! Screws, safe tools, lids, old CD’s, jewellery, bottle tops, buttons.  They will tinker and create. If you can find old equipment to take apart, then once you have made it safe they can mend and fix for hours. Old remotes, phones, etc are great for this. Make a tinkering box which you add to over time.

• http://littleworldsbigadventures.com/loose-parts-play-at-home/

   

  https://www.playscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/Play-Scotland-Loose-Parts-Leaflet.pdf

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• Dress up! Provide accessories, rather than actual outfits. Scarves, hats, bags, jewellery. Children can become a variety of characters. Make up stories about who you are.
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• Provide scissors and anything! Card, paper, material, play dough. Children start by making snips in paper, and then begin to cut a straight line. They may need a little help to hold the scissors correctly. Great for strengthening hands and fingers.

• Here's some ideas for playing in beds!

  https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/features/article/keeping-children-healthy-indoors-part-1-beds