Many of us have a long weekend, with a public holiday this Friday

It is nice to have the time to spend together, but of course at the moment we can’t spend it with everyone we’d like to

Young children might miss seeing their friends, their grandparents, parents who are away or other family members

If we can, video calls can be a great way to say hello and chat. There are lots of games we can play on a video call too that can make us feel great as we have fun together

So no new idea today, but here are some from the last few weeks that are particularly good for playing through video calls

Please enjoy, stay safe and we will have more ideas for fun and learning at home next week

Make music (well, noise!) with an Awful Orchestra

Test your powers of observation with Spot the Difference

Look out old photos and Share some Stories

Creep and crawl with Incy Wincy Spider

Catch each other out with Copy Cats and Simon Says

Challenge each other to hunt your homes for Treasure

Go silly with some Sock Puppets

Have a sing song with Old MacDonald, Little Bo Peep, Hickory Dickory Dock or Baa Baa Black Sheep!

If you are lucky enough to get your hands on some water balloons here are some ideas for indoor and outdoor play. Some children might be worried initially about getting wet so there are some tips below to help them join in. Others will love to get everyone wet – so plan before you play and have fun!

As well as being fun, messing about with water balloons is great to building attention skills, learning new words, and also about sequences – this is really good for maths and writing later on.

Sensory issues?

Some children really don’t like the feel of being wet, so these ideas may help:

• If your child doesn’t like the feel of cold water put warm water in the balloon.
• If they don’t like getting their hands wet dry off the balloon after filling.
• Try them wearing rubber or other gloves.
• Model it a few times, your child may not want to do it themselves at first.

Please don’t go out and buy lots of expensive equipment, apps or toys or feel you have to provide your child with endless worksheets.  These might be heavily marketed during this time, but your child can learn very well just from ordinary toys, story books, everyday objects and going out and about.

Sometimes the most educational object is the cardboard box, not the expensive toy it came in. Time playing with you is more valuable than anything else for learning and development.

And you don’t have to spend ages planning learning opportunities.  The everyday life of your home has lots of ways to learn like matching socks, laying the table, preparing food, making lists, looking after pets, counting money and so on and so on.

We will be posting lots of ideas in the next few weeks to support this – and you will think of even better ones yourself, so please share them through commenting!