Top Tips for Home Schooling Pre-Schoolers

It’s no mean feat keeping toddlers and pre-schoolers happy and occupied at home all day long; especially if you’ve got more than one of them - and not to mention all the other demands on your time, space and purse strings into the bargain!

Like most schools and childcare settings, we have been working hard to send age-appropriate packs of resources home to our families, providing a range of worksheets, colouring pages, activity ideas and more to try and help parents and carers carry the load as far as we can. But, if you are looking for a few fail-safe ideas to keep your little people occupied through long days and weeks, check out our Top 5 Tips below and we wish you happy, healthy days together.

Our Top 5 Tips

1. Treasure Hunts

There are so many ways you can do treasure hunts and keep your kids out of your hair for about the amount of time it takes to drink a cup of tea… which is something! If you’ve got time on your side, then go to town and make some clues (just pictures of the relevant hiding spots works if your children can’t read and you want them to do the whole thing without you) and hide a selection of things throughout the house, culminating in something they can either play with or eat!

If you’re low on time, you might want to hide items in the style of an easter egg hunt and send them off to find them. Small plastic animals work well for this - if they can find a whole zoo they can then build one out of lego for the animals!

2. Dance Party

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Crank up the tunes and everybody shake it!

3. Daily Journal

If you haven’t got any spare notebooks, simply grab a few sheets of A4 paper, any colour will do, fold them in half to fashion a book and staple down the spine. Allocate one page to each day, write the name of the day at the top of the page, spill out all the felt tips and pencils and ask the children to draw a picture of the best thing that happened to them that day. If you want to be a little more hands on then sit down with them to write a few sentences to sum up the best part of the day, if not, see what they can come up with themselves.

4. Ice Play

Freeze a selection of ice cubes in a range of colours and shapes - a drop of food colouring here and there will transform your cubes into a rainbow of colours. When the kids are bored, whip out a pile of tea towels, a bowl of warm water (to help the melting process along) some bowls, cups, spoons and anything else you can think of, empty out the ice cubes into a bowl and let their imaginations go wild. We’ve seen igloos, towers, imaginative cooking games and more come out of this activity!

5. Quiet Boxes

These are great - but there are a few rules to follow to make them work their best magic.

Find a small box for each child - a shoe box works well. If you’re really keen, you can get them to decorate it themselves in readiness. Each day the box will contain a ‘kit’ for the child to play with independently for around 15-30 minutes (depending on their age). You might find you have to accept only a short amount of time from this to begin with, and lots of requests to join them, but they get better with practice, we promise!

So, eventually, you can use the quiet box for a good length of time to replace screen time or allow you to make breakfast/lunch/dinner/do some work / have a cup of tea in peace!

Here are some ideas for the content of your boxes (just one selection of bits per box - don’t go too mad or they lose interest, strangely):

• A pile of lolly sticks / some toy animals / handful of cotton wool balls.

• A selection of buttons / letters and numbers drawn onto bits of card / bendy pipe cleaners.

• A few sheets of stickers / paper plates.

• a selection of beads / bendy pipe cleaners / paper cups.

• Lego people / matchsticks / coloured pompoms.