Primary School Lockdown Ideas – 8 Awesome Activities to Engage Your Child at Home
Keeping up with your home learning schedule is important, but you knew that already. With primary schools in lockdown, maybe you’re trying to come up with new ideas to support your child during their time at home?
In this article, mother of two Dania Jasem thinks outside the box. Exploring new ways to engage your child while educating them at home. She acknowledges that while online learning is great, it’s ok to take the learning offline too!
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Home learning activities and ideas to do with your child while primary schools are lockdown down
It’s important to note that these ideas are less focused on helping your child with the objectives of their school’s English or maths curriculum. They are designed to help your child wind down, while still being productive during their time at home.
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A mum’s guide to primary school lockdown: 8 ideas to help your child
Creating a Covid-19 time capsule
As daunting and horrible some these days maybe, they are memorable. The time everything shut down. Creating a time capsule will allow children to see this time as more an adventure than a lockdown. You can challenge your child to write sentences on how they are spending their days, or how they feel.
This is age dependent, so for the much younger children they can draw instead, or they can write two or three-word sentences. For older children, they can create a diary of some sort.
This can be an ongoing, daily activity. When this lockdown is over, they can bury it if you have a garden or give it back to you – it could make for an awesome birthday present once they’re all grown up!
Cooking or baking
Cooking is a great idea, get counting, measuring, and timing! Best of all, your child won’t even realise that they’re learning maths.
You can encourage reading by studying recipe instructions carefully. Go through each step and ask your child to read aloud. You can also ask them concept checking questions to check their understanding.
Most importantly, they’re acquiring the essential life skill of cooking!
Fridge magnets
Invest in both number and alphabet fridge magnets. This can be a fun way to go over your child’s phonics. Try making the sound and checking if your child reaches for the correct letter.
You can also use the fridge magnets to create tricky words. This will help older children with their spelling.
In terms of the numbers of magnets, you can have a lot of math fun. You can ask your child to show what number you are saying. You can also create math sentences and help them solve everything in the fridge. As the mother of a Year 1 child, trust me, fridge magnets are your go-to this lockdown!
Reading
This is always a popular choice to do, it doesn’t include any preparation and can be really fun. Reading is a great way to build your little one’s vocabulary. Reading with parents helps to create a different perspective on a story, this will also help you to bond with your child.
You can go a step further by doing role play with the story that you are reading, letting them (age depending) read some of the lines.
Maths bingo
The mathematical version of this game includes the players writing 5 numbers. Now, these numbers can be the answer to maths arithmetic.
Please note this will only work if there are 3 or more people.
For example: if you were to do the 10 times table you would write 10,20,30,40,50.
Another person will call out a maths question for example what is 10 x 3. If a player had the number 30, they would cross it out.
The first person to cross numbers will call out bingo and be announced the winner.
Family Board Games
Children spend so much time on video games, whereas this will allow them to bond with you and learn!
Games like Snakes and Ladders are great for developing mathematical skills. Players are constantly counting and working out how many places they need to move forward.
Painting and colouring
Now, this can be messy, but you need to think of this in a more educational way. This activity allows your child to become creative and allows them to express their emotions during this hard time.
On a maths basis, this can be an educational opportunity to learn about shapes. It can be an opportunity to learn a mathematical language such as measuring, symmetry, sizes. All this while having fun!
Explore shapes around you
This is the best of them all. It allows your child to use their imagination. They need to look around their surroundings and see what shapes there are in their surroundings. This can also be done when you are in your daily walks.
You can take this a step further and have a bit of a competition. You can say how many square-shaped (or any other shape) can you spot?
Looking for more lockdown ideas while primary schools are closed?
Think Academy UK has prepared home learning study packs for Years 1 – 6 pupils that you can download and print for free! Please see the list below:
Key Stage 1:
Key Stage 2:
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Read more:
UK Schools Lockdown: Helping Children Adjust to Learning At Home
