Activities For Extended Time At Home

1. Sorting

Sorting is a great way for children to develop different types of skills. It is scientific (observational) and can be tied to literacy, math, and motor skills. You may have to sit with your child until they get the rules down. You can do this with just about anything, or print things off of your computer and cut them small enough to fit in the containers you are using. To make it more challenging, you could have them pick the type of sorting as well (by color, first letter, rhyme, animal type, etc.).

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MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED:

• Containers for sorting: This can be trays, serve-ware, Tupperware, cups, or bowls, ice cube trays, etc.

• Chip and salsa trays, cheese trays, or anything with separators.
• A large tray with ramekins can also be helpful for defining the workspace
• You can also add tongs or scoopers for motor skill development

• Objects to sort: you can get creative with this depending on age and ability.

• sort by the first letter (animal toys, other small toys, or even various alphabet pieces you may have or puzzle pieces you might have, you can print out letters with different fonts and cut them small to sort)
• sort by color: you can do this with anything that will fit into the containers- also consider crayons, marker caps, legos, marbles, and even food.
• sort by size: this is a great topic for natural material sorting, as in the photo above with shells.
• sort by rhyme
• sort by climate/habitat

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2.) Matching Games

This is a relatively easy activity to set up but it works even better if you have a laminator. I would start with a topic that your children really like. For example, one year I had a child in my classroom from France who struggled to connect with other children, but she really loved horses. I found pictures of different types of horses and turned them into a matching game. This led to further investigation of horses with the entire classroom. This is just one topic of many, many topics to help encourage interaction with literacy.

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MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED:

• Printer
• An application like Word, Pages, Google Docs, Photoshop, etc.

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HOW TO MAKE THEM:

1. Choose a topic

• Animals, animals by habitat (arctic, forest, sea, etc.), photos of the family, alphabet letters, alphabet letters with different fonts, numbers, math sentences, works of art, etc.

1. Look online for a base of photos. You can save photos by right-clicking and pressing “Save As”. Just make sure you are saving a file type that says jpg., png. or .pdf.
2. Set up a sheet of paper in an app where you can work with grids and photos.
3. Size the photos you find within a grid so that all the photo squares end up being the same size.
4. Be sure to print 2 copies if you are playing a matching game (some years I would use these picture cards for alphabet matching too!) ‘
5. Additional Notes:

• If you have a laminator, print out two sheets of paper with a design on them to adhere to the backside of the paper (or if you can print double-sided! you can do it that way too!) and laminate them together to make it card-like.
• You can also make printable grids on your computer, with numbers or the alphabet (see photo above).

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3.) Create Collections

Going outside is an excellent way to boost the immune system. I personally love a daily morning walk. Thinking about the type of things to collect for the season, get your children excited to hunt for {pinecones, leaves, rocks, sticks, tree nuts}.

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HOW TO USE THEM:

• Natural materials are my personal favorite for imaginary play. Unlike fake food, you really have to imagine that a pile of rocks is soup, that a pinecone is a hot dog, and that a pile of sticks is your side of french fries.

• You can enhance building blocks and other building materials with them
• You can use them for art – grab some paint and go outside or set up a wipeable tablecloth if you don’t have a designated space at home for the beautiful mess of creating with paint. It’s fun to try to paint WITH the natural materials as well (not just on them).
• You can sort with them. Rocks or shells are my favorites for this because you can often find rocks of many colors- even purples and blues!
• You can find inspirational art to mimic or prompt with. Andy Goldsworthy is a personal favorite. There are several artists who use natural materials in stunning ways to create art.

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4.) Exploring with Art Materials

Creating is full of endless possibilities. If you take the time to teach children about the art materials, how they work, what they can and cannot do, how to properly clean up, and the consequences that can occur, they often can handle them in appropriate ways.

Think of activities like recipe cards, you typically have a list of steps and information before you dive into the actual activity of baking. Children are able to process this, and when you take the time to set up learning and expectations, it pays off.

Here is a quick list of ideas on how to approach ways to prompt children to create, materials you can use. etc.:

• Paint: in the classroom, we used emptied soap containers filled with primary colors and put out baskets of empty baby food jars to allow children to create their own colors. We set up various brushes for children to choose from and various types of paper. We also had empty plastic bins to put the jars and brushes in for cleaning. This made it easy for children to take them to the sink when they were finished. We walked the children through a lesson on paint before letting them use the materials. We spoke about how the jars can break, what to do if they break, how to clean up properly, and what happens to the materials if they are not cleaned up properly.

• Observational Drawings: these are easy to incorporate into other activities. It increases observation and drawing skills, but it can also extend play through the act of documentation. Drawing can help a child to process what they built, prompt them to sketch out ideas to build and discover what children find beautiful or want to remember. Guide children by asking about shapes or colors: “What shapes do you see? Is it round? is it pointy? does it look like a triangle or a circle? which part is taller? which part is longer? which part is darker? How could we make this one bigger?”

• Clay: Clay is very messy but also very fun and sensorily pleasing. Like observational drawings, children can create 3D objects that reflect things they love, structures they built, or topics they are curious about. Below you will see a “chicken”, as well as a mixture of clay, toilet paper rolls (b/c obvi. we have plenty of those right now!), and sticks with an observational drawing of the work. I typically walked children through a session on how clay works, including what it can and cannot do. You can find air-dry clay in many stores. The best kind of clay is the kind that bakes!

• To put pieces of clay together (for example, legs on a body), you can make a clay “glue” which is part clay and part water (called slip). It helps if you “score the clay” making indentations for the “slip” to sit in before sticking the pieces together.

• Boxes: Boxes can fill up multiple days worth of occupation. There are so many things children can explore and build using boxes. For example, one year in our preschool studio the children wanted to make spaceships. We sat and spoke about spaceships, what they are for, what the parts are, etc. We planned out the shape of the spaceships and what would be needed. We spent weeks crafting our spaceships with paint, paper, and large boxes. Instead of recycling the many boxes the online shopping procures, use them as prompts

This section can be wildly taboo, but I have seen firsthand the abilities children have to be careful, thoughtful, and intentional with REAL tools. It took careful conversation, planning, and lessons before we sent them into investigation mode.

• We put out a hammer and nails with wood blocks (as well as safety goggles and thick gloves!) and allowed children to pull nails out of the blocks and practice hammering them in on a shop table. You can find different kinds of nails, screws, wood, hammers, etc. that fit the needs of the child. Not all nails are super sharp, not all hammers are large and heavy, etc.
• We found old computers at thrift stores and let children experiment with all sorts of tools to investigate the insides.

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ONE FINAL THOUGHT

REMEMBER TO HAVE CONVERSATIONS

This time at home can become precious, especially if you remove the burden of needing to get things done and allow yourself to be fully present with your children. They are filled with energy, ideas, desires, motivations, thoughts, and feelings. This is a great time to find out more about who your children are, what they like. You can directly fuel the extended time at home by helping them pursue the topics that they intrinsically want to learn about or create from. In the classroom, we often used thought webs to discover what the children know about a topic already, as well as what they want to know, and how they could find out those things. When children see that adults are on the journey with them, a bond occurs that can become extremely valuable, and they typically become even more motivated to learn.

Ask a lot of questions, be present with them, and become interested in the intrigue and wonder of their brains! Try not to correct what they are creating and instead guide them into their own discovery (of what adults know to be “right”) to build their confidence and allow them to have creativity.

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