This page contains animated ways to support your child's learning in the early years.
- For guidance on Toilet training visit the ERIC website.
- For guidance on how to support your child with Speech and Language difficulties, access information from GHC NHS.
- Advice from the Government’s Hungry Little Minds campaign on activities to do with your child.
- For advice and guidance on how to keep children safe online please visit the NSPCC’s.
Every Child has the right:
- Not to have to fight
- To expect people to be kind.
- Not to be made fun of.
- Not to be made sad.
- Not to be scared of adults.
- To have friends.
- To be brought up in a loving caring home.
- To be surrounded by positive role models.
- To learn by making mistakes.
- To be safe.
We all have a part to play in ensuring each child has the right. Filling their world with positive role models will have a dramatic impact on their futures.
This is usually a lovely part of the bed time routine that tells your child it is time now to settle down for bed. It is sometimes difficult in our busy routines to give it the time it deserves but even as the day is drawing to the end, your child is still ready for more learning.
Choose books together with lots of pictures and talk about each picture and what your child thinks might be going on. Sometimes don’t read the book but use the pictures to make up your own stories.
Ask your child questions to ask them to think more deeply about what is happening for example;
- What do you think the book is about?
- What is happening in the picture?
- What do you think might happen next?
- How do you think Dora may be thinking?
- Which part of the book did you like best?
- Why are they your favourite?
Read the story with lots of expression to bring it to life. Speak slowly and clearly, allow your child time to think about the story and a question and respond, don’t answer for them. If stories are made fun now, your child will develop a love of books that will support their future literacy development.
Play group is designed to be a safe environment for your child to build up lots of experience with messy play. Shaving foam in the bath or tray of Glup (cornflower and water) can produce the same effect at home.
By using something different you can encourage your child to have a go. Singing pat a cake pat a cake in the bath with a handful of shaving foam encourages even the most reluctant singers to join in, tapping out the beat as they go. Music is a very mathematical based subject and from a simple song, you can encourage your child to count the beats, follow a pattern of beats that you do and create one for you to follow. These are all early mathematical skills, sequencing counting and problem solving that will help as they transfer to school.
Glup is fantastic for the children to begin developing gross motor skills that will help support their writing. Encourage your child to draw circles in the glup or make an anticlockwise and clockwise spiral. They need to work quickly and press hard before the glup swallows up their efforts. Remember it is so important to allow them time to explore alone and to discuss what they are experiencing, using a wide variety of textural rich language.
Explore and Understand Numbers
- Number Rhymes
Think about how your child can join in make it fun, encourage them to count back as well as forward and occasionally get it wrong. Children love the opportunity to correct us and more importantly will be more inclined to have a go themselves when they are not sure if they think its ok to get it wrong because even grown ups do that. - Games
Using a dice with dots and moving on to a number dice can help adapt a game so regardless of ability your child can join in or a sibling can join in. Turn taking for young children is naturally difficult as is losing the game, but it is important for them to develop skills to cope using the phrase “second winner” could help initially. - Numbers all around.
Mathematical development can be developed at any time and should not need to involve sitting at a table as young children have varying attention spans and soon enough will be doing that at school. It is not necessary to have expensive toys to help your child develop good early number skills. Normal daily activities provide a rich supply of opportunities for us to support our child’s learning:
- How many letters has the post man brought today.
- How many potatoes have we got, if you have one how many are left?
- Use a clock and encourage them to see what number the BIG and LITTLE hand are near.
- In the garden create a water gauge out of a plastic bottle with numbers at the side create a bar chart to record their results.
- Make sandwiches for lunch and cut some into half, rectangular and triangularly and then quarters. Sub divide again if your child can count them and use them like a puzzle to see what other shapes can be made I.e. 2 triangles make a square.
- Use language to describe position, behind, underneath, next to, in front of to help a child locate things or put things away.
- In the bath is a great time to look at volume and capacity. Plastic jugs and cups of different sizes provide hours of opportunity for learning.
Young children learn to use a range of words like heavy, light, tall and short. To start with they just say big and little for everything, whether for size or weight measuring. Later they learn that long, tall, high, wide and short are all words to do with measuring length. They will also begin to pick up words like meter, centimetre, kilos and litres naturally as we talk.
- Talk about the sequence of the traffic lights, encourage your child to guess what colour comes next.
- Can you find numbers on bill boards, shop fascia’s and number plates.
- Guess how many red cars you are going to see on your journey and then count them to see.
- Guess how many dogs/prams you see on your journey.
- Providing your child with a simple shopping list not only makes shopping a nicer experience for everyone but also makes your child feel important. Draw a picture of what you want and write next to it the quantity. Order your list so they have something from each aisle you will be visiting to keep their interest.
- Let your child pay for the shopping encouraging them to notice the different colours and sizes of the money.
- Let them have the receipt to look at and see if they can spot any numbers.
- Number Bingo, have a bingo board (download one here) and a clip board with a pen attached and cross off the numbers seen.
- Let them help you put the shopping away. Can they decide what needs to go in the fridge and sort them out, sort the tins into groups of the same, count the empty shopping bags and put them away.