These ideas from our education team will help get your children’s creativity flowing as well as some suggestions for relaxing, quieter experiences.
Musical ideas
- Game: Statues, musical chairs or cushions
- Sing your welcome song together that you would sing at your early learning centre
- Make your own musical instruments and create a song
- Clap and stamp to the beat
- Make up your own actions for a song
- Get dressed up, perform a song, then film it so your child can watch it and share it with their family or friends if they want to!
Ideas to spark creativity
- Painting/finger painting
- Decorating cakes
- Trying out a new sandwich combination for lunch
- Cutting from magazines to create words/collage
- Scrapbooking
- Journal writing
- Marble roll painting in a tray with paint
- Chalk drawing on your driveway, fence or pavement
- Paint with a feather or left paintbrush
- Blow up a balloon and each day add a layer of papier-mache – paper soaked in flour and water (glue). Decorate it once you have enough layers on it to pop the balloon and it keeps its shape.
Loose parts ideas
- Sensory tubs with pebbles, sand, slime, gelatine, water, beads – anything you can find!
- Nuts and bolts
- Wood and nails
- Empty boxes to be used to set up a mini shopping centre- linking numeracy and literacy to role-playing a supermarket.
- Create a heuristic play basket with an assortment of things. Here are some ideas: jars, lids, wooden curtain rings, pom poms, large corks, wooden pegs, cardboard cylinders, large sinkers, textured balls, small whisks, bangles, shells, Rings, pine cones, stones
- Sort and combine your treasures in interesting ways and be prepared to rearrange on different days: by colour, by shape, form or perhaps use. Include items that encourage learners to fill, empty, stack, flip and sort. (Keep in mind there is no right way to use the objects, this is an open-ended experience with no sense of completion or testing of achievement applied). Use beautiful fabrics to line your baskets.
Quiet, restful, mindfulness ideas:
- Yoga – Cosmic Kids
- Reading stories in a quiet area, make a blanket tent
- Eye’s closed listening to nature sound or soothing sounds
- Guided meditation
- Audiobooks
- Using a soft brush/feather on your arm or face
- Stress ball
- Noise-cancelling earmuffs
- Vestibular stimulation, swinging in a hammock/swing
Cooking:
Did you know we have a whole YouTube channel of simple and healthy recipes to prepare with children? Here is a sample of what we have:
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