4. Week 1 - Thursday
Nursery-age children:
Listening skills
Play a listening game by hiding things in a bag or under a blanket, for example keys, and give them a shake. Or turn on the tap and listen to the water running. Can your child tell where the noise is coming from? Can they tell you what it is before they see it?
Listen to sounds together.
- Outside sounds - BBC website
Take your child on a walk to the shops and listen carefully to the noises all around you. Model sentences to your child, encouraging them to talk about themselves, for example, “I can hear cars” or “I can hear a dog barking”.
Dinosaur hunt
Make the most of the outdoors and find some dinosaurs. Try drawing some dinosaur footprints for your child to find. Use egg boxes to collect any treasure that you might find. You could even look for dinosaur eggs.
Make some number cards to take with you (1, 2 and 3). Can your child find the same number of objects to match to the number cards, for example, one leaf, two twigs, three rocks?
Hide some items under other things, get your child to find them and then explain where they found them, for example under the rock, under the plant pot, etc.
Play a memory game, taking turns to remember what you’ve seen on your Dinosaur Hunt and encouraging your child to develop their sentences. Start the game by saying “I went on a Dinosaur Hunt and I found a…”.
- Play memory games - BBC website
Reception-age children:
Observation and reading skills
Look for labels on food tins and packets in your cupboards. Can your child point to the writing, any specific letter sounds or maybe even find some numbers? Can you sort your tins and packets into different groups, for example by colour or shape?
Help your child to read the simple words on the cards below by sounding them out and find each item in the pictures from ‘The Runaway Pea’ book.