Hey parents! We’ve rounded up our favorite ideas to help you stay on top of activities for your child or children! These ideas can help guide and organize your day at home with children of any age while making sure they’re still learning. Help your young learners succeed at home and at school!
Look over any resources sent home by educational institutions and follow the instructions given by teachers. Your child may need to complete certain tasks for school within a particular timeframe. If you child’s school hasn’t given out specific information, there are plenty of free resources that can be found online!
Once you gain an understanding of the activities you want to do with your child, create a schedule to help keep their day as consistent as possible! Children thrive best on a daily routine. Even though the youngest of learners may not understand the concept of a schedule, keeping them on a consistent track each day will help their learning. A schedule helps your child feel secure and understand day-to-day expectations. Since your child is at home and not in their regular school environment, you might see changes in behavior. This is normal! Creating and discussing the schedule with your child will help them get a picture of how their day or week will look at home and will help set the expectation of learning even if they aren’t physically at school. Here’s a FREE downloadable schedule we’ve created as a starting point for parents. Feel free to create your own, specific schedule once you fully understand your child’s needs.
Movement and topic changes are helpful when working with children. Children’s little minds work best when rotating subjects and topics frequently. As children get older, their attention spans tend to grow. Letting children get up and be interactive while learning allows their attention spans to last longer. Don’t be afraid to incorporate active play breaks during your day! These brain break dice are perfect to keep on-hand when it’s time for a quick break!
Rewards and incentives can help keep your children on task while at home. Keeping track of children’s good behavior can be as simple as a sticker reward chart, filling a jar with cotton balls, or a good behavior punch card. Rewards for children can be catered to your household, but good examples of reward-based activities are baking cookies together, building a fort, or having a movie night.
See all of our awards and incentives here!
There are plenty of tools you can use at home to make teaching your child a bit easier. Tools such as bottle caps, pom-poms, playdough, paper cups, and even plastic spoons all work well and are fairly inexpensive teaching tools. All of these materials make great manipulatives for both math and reading. You can write letters and numbers, draw shapes, and even create fun lessons on sorting, patterning, and spelling! Letting children use their imagination is so important and journaling can be a very relaxing activity for children. Give your kids fun writing prompts and then have them write down their stories. Try using these Half-Size Composition Journals for younger writers. The lines on each page are large enough for kiddos who are still practicing their handwriting. You could also take a show and tell approach to storytelling and have children draw scenes to go with their story using these giant Write & Draw Story Posters. Kids will be so excited to share their ideas with you during story time!
