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24 At-Home Learning Activities to Share with Parents of Young Children

*We originally published this post near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some things have changed since then, the activities in this post are still great skill-builders for young children! 

As schools close due to COVID-19 concerns and new guidelines on social distancing take effect, many parents are home with their young children—and looking for new ways to keep them occupied while building on the skills they’ve been learning in the classroom. Keeping kids engaged and active (without overusing screens!) can be tough during an unexpected break like this, especially when new safety recommendations put a temporary hold on play dates, restaurant trips, and visits to crowded parks, zoos, and other places kids love.

If you’re a parent of young children—or if you work with families—today’s post is tailored especially for you. We’re bringing you a collection of 24 at-home learning activities parents can use to boost their child’s academic, motor, communication, and social-emotional skills while they’re home from school. Adapted from some of our best books on early childhood development and education, these fun and inexpensive activities will keep kids learning and give you easy ways to connect with them during this unexpected break in routine.

Please share these ideas with any families who might benefit, and if you have a favorite at-home activity to share, add it in the comments below!

Academic skills

Give mealtime a math infusion. Do your kids like to help out in the kitchen? Meal prep is the perfect time to get children counting, measuring, estimating, comparing, and recognizing shapes. Ask your child to measure and count cups of ingredients, count how many plates and utensils are needed for the whole family, and figure out who has more or less mashed potatoes. Get creative with math during cleanup time, too: you can have your child name the shapes of the dishes and sponges, count the number of steps they took to complete the cleanup task, and predict how many dishes will fit in the dishwasher. (Want more ideas? Download this free tip sheet for 24 ways to have fun with math at home.)

Supercharge your storytimes. Your daily book reading sessions are golden opportunities to actively build early literacy skills. To boost vocabulary knowledge, watch for words you think your child may not know and briefly define and talk about them. When you reread a book, ask your child if they remember what the word means, and try to use the new words at other times of the day to reinforce knowledge. To build letter recognition skills, try pointing to letters as you say their names, singing a slowed-down ABC song while you point to each letter in the book. Turn to random pages in the book and see if children can name and point to the letters themselves. You can follow up by having your child make their own ABC book, finding or drawing pictures for each letter.

Reread all your child’s comfort books. At times like these, when you’re home together and it seems like life is slowing down, sink into some comfort rereads of favorite picture books. Kids love hearing the same book many times, and the repetition is actually beneficial to their developing literacy skills, since it gives them multiple chances to absorb the language of the book. If you want to make the most of repeated readings, choose high-quality books with words that stretch your child’s vocabulary and language knowledge.

Make a museum. Your child’s favorite museum might be closed to the public right now, but they can make one at home with a little imagination and a few simple materials. If your child has collected little treasures over the years (rocks, shells, toy dinosaurs, buttons, etc.), show them how to arrange their collections in themed displays using shoe boxes, small jars, or egg cartons. Help children label their treasures—a great way to practice letter writing and recognition—and build their language skills by encouraging them to give “tours” of their personal museum to visitors. (Also, did you know that many museums are giving free virtual tours right now? Here’s a list of them, and here’s a link to the kid-friendly online tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While you’re teaching young children at home, a virtual museum tour might be a fun way to spark conversations about art and history. )

Start a language-rich restaurant at home. If your family eats out regularly, kids might be missing the interesting change in routine that a restaurant offers. Why not start a restaurant at home, and use it to help teach language and literacy skills? Stock your play area with empty boxes, food containers, and restaurant props with writing on them, such as takeout menus, placemats, or a newspaper circular. Read the menu with them, or help them create their own menus from scratch. Help kids make a sign with their restaurant’s name. As children play, point out words on the restaurant props and encourage them to spot familiar letters and words.

Create a dedicated writing center. To make writing/prewriting activities inviting to young children, designate a table or desk as your home’s “writing center.” Fill it with open-ended materials that invite exploration and experimentation. Offer kids blank paper in different colors, a small dry erase board, markers, crayons, pencils, scissors, glue sticks, hole punches, and envelopes. Kids who have a variety of materials on hand will be more likely to initiate self-directed writing projects.

Measure their masterworks. Are your kids passing the time by making a long cardboard road for their cars, or building a tall tower with blocks? Dig out your ruler and incorporate a little measurement lesson into their play. Show them how to use the ruler to measure the length of their road or the height of their tower. They might have fun predicting how many inches long or feet high their creations are.

Help math and science skills bloom in your garden. If you’re starting work on a garden, this is a perfect opportunity to teach math and science concepts while your kids get some much-needed fresh air. Have them measure water into a watering can, count seeds, start tallying days on a calendar to keep track of plant growth, and record observations. (If you don’t have a backyard, you can start a windowsill garden with kids. They can measure soil into small pots, count and plant seeds, predict which seeds will sprout first, and make observations.)

Communication skills

Have an adventure—without leaving your living room. Sit with your kids on a rug or couch and pretend you’re leaving for a big adventure on a magic carpet, submarine, or school bus. Ask them to share their ideas on where they want to visit, and take turns concocting a story about your adventure. Describe the sights you see and ask kids questions that invite their creative participation: “Look, there’s a circus! Can you see the elephants? What are they doing?” “Do you see that school of fish? What do you think fish learn about in school?” This is a great way to strengthen communication skills while having fun with kids who feel cooped up.

Put on a play. Encourage your kids to collaborate on a short play using a few puppets. They can adapt a familiar story or fairy tale, or create their own story together. After they put on the play, talk with them about the story and characters, and ask them questions about how they developed the play.

Set up a home office for kids. This is an indoor activity kids love, especially if your own home office is getting a workout right now—they’ll enjoy the chance to be “just like you.” Set up a pretend office in a corner of your home where kids can make calls, write letters and “send” them, and type important emails. Be sure to provide lots of varied materials for them to work with: an old keyboard to type with, file folders and paper, a calculator, an old phone (toy or real), pens and pencils, tape, envelopes, rubber stamps, and notepads. Then pretend with them—give them a “call” and ask when the mail will be arriving, or ask to have a face-to-face meeting in their office.

Start your own store. If your kids are missing the chance to shop in stores with you, open your own department store in your room or in their playroom. Encourage kids to play different roles—shopper, sales clerk, cashier—and communicate with each other in character (or you can play one or more roles). This is an ideal activity to try if you’ve been doing spring cleaning; children can browse the items you’re getting rid of and “buy” a few items with pretend money.

Have some flashlight fun. This activity can help boost communication skills while easing your child into bedtime. Once your child is in bed, give them a flashlight and play with it together in the darkened room. Take turns shining the light on different things. Ask your child questions about the items in the room, and talk about what you see. Whisper and laugh together, and make up a silly story. Bedtime chats like these hone language skills while helping your child feel safe, secure, and calm.

Motor skills

Enjoy the outdoors. Communal playtimes at the park may not be possible right now, but you can still enjoy outdoor family activities that give your child’s motor skills a pick-me-up. Choose activities that involve both gross motor skills (running, jumping, playing catch, dribbling a ball) and fine motor skills (collecting and sorting objects, using small tools). Go on a family walk and play “I Spy.” Have an outdoor family dance party. Collect things like pinecones, acorns, and pretty stones in a pail, and help your child sort them into groups. Make and hang homemade feeders for your backyard or windowsill birds. Your kids will get critical motor skills practice, and the fresh air and fun will give everyone an emotional boost.

Open your own “art school.” Start by reading your child some favorite picture books and talking about the different techniques the artists used for the illustrations. Then have the child practice fine motor skills by making books or illustrations of their own, using materials such as watercolors, paste, paper, cloth scraps, ribbon, foil, string, stamps, greeting cards, and box tops. When they’re done, your kids can hang their masterpieces in a special gallery area or “read” their illustrated books to you or each other.

Try some target practice. While there’s a temporary hold on those family trips to Target, give another kind of target a try. Cut a few 8- to 9-inch holes in a big piece of cardboard, draw a target with chalk on a sidewalk or in your driveway, or pick a target outside, such as a tree, your garage door, or the side of your apartment building. Encourage your child to try to throw a beanbag or small ball through the holes or at the target. Have your child start very close to the target and then move back a few feet, and show them how to throw underhand and overhand. Be sure to cheer for them when they hit the target.

Make egg carton caterpillars. If you’re shifting to at-home cooking and using up lots of eggs, here’s a fun fine-motor activity to do with those leftover cardboard egg cartons. Cut the egg section of the cartons into strips, one for each child in your house. Have each child choose a caterpillar body and decorate it with paint or markers or by gluing on different colors or textures of paper. Pipe cleaners make great antennae, and children may even want to add some pipe cleaner legs to their caterpillar. Remind them to draw or glue on a face!

Outline an animal. Does your child have a favorite animal? Draw a simple silhouette of the animal on a big piece of paper and give your child some glue and a bowl of Cheerios or uncooked pasta shapes. Then have the child outline the animal by gluing the cereal or pasta pieces to the page, following the lines you drew. (Always supervise carefully when children are working with small items that could be a choking hazard.)

Social-emotional skills

Have regular emotional check-ins. During challenging times, young children can easily pick up on the stress and worry of the adults in their lives. Disruptions to regular schedules, troubling news stories, bans on social gatherings, and overheard adult conversations can leave a child confused and concerned about the future. Set aside time to check in and connect with your child every day. Talk about your day and what will happen tomorrow. Ask them simple questions: “What was the best part of today?” “Were there any hard parts?” “How did you feel?” “Do you have anything you’d like to talk about?” Listen carefully to what your child says so they know their thoughts and emotions are important to you. (For more social-emotional skill-boosters for children ages 2 months through 5 years, print these free ASQ:SE-2 activity sheets. And for a helpful guide to answering children’s questions about the coronavirus, see this resource from Zero to Three.)

Pound some dough together. Mushing, squeezing, and pounding dough is a great activity for helping kids process feelings of anger, frustration, and helplessness (and housebound grownups might find this just as therapeutic). Mix up some cookie dough (like these “Get the Mad Out” cookies on the PBS website) and mash and knead it together. Or if baking isn’t your thing, let the kids smush and pound play dough or clay. They’ll let off steam in a safe way and hone their creativity at the same time.

Encourage nurturing play. When the world feels scary, nurturing dolls and stuffed animals is a good way for children to refocus their feelings and practice caring behavior. Set up toy cribs where children can put their “babies” to bed, water tables where kids can bathe their dolls, and places where the babies can be fed with old bottles, sippy cups, and spoons. Help children create caregiving scenarios and praise children for their TLC. (Be sure to include kids of all genders in this activity—every child can benefit from practicing their caring skills.)

Use books as bibliotherapy. Book reading is one of the best ways to help children deal with fears and worries in uncertain times. Select books that deal with big changes and tough emotions and have reassuring endings. Discuss how the characters dealt with adversity, adjusted to a new situation, and managed their fears. Learning about characters who faced difficult situations and emerged triumphant can help assure children that their family can make it through hard times, too.

Try some therapeutic art, too. Art activities are more than just fun—they can provide children with a powerful outlet for their emotions. Alice Honig describes one example in her book Little Kids, Big Worries: “Lonnie drew a bus and then scribbled all over it with a brown marker. The teacher was puzzled. She did not act disappointed by his scribbles. She did ask him gently to tell her about his picture. The child soberly explained, “That is the ambulance that took my dad to the hospital.’ The brown scribbles over Lonnie’s picture expressed his dark scared feelings about his father’s illness.” Teach children how art can be a healthy way to process difficult emotions, and provide them with lots of different materials they can use to express whatever they might be feeling: pages from magazines, photos, stickers, paint and markers in vivid colors, etc.

Share a story from faraway family members. Many children are finding it hard to be separated from their extended family members right now, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends. Reach out and ask a few beloved family members to record themselves reading your child a story out loud. Your child can follow along in the book with them or just enjoy listening. This can be a wonderfully reassuring experience during a time of stress and uncertainty.

We hope this post gave you some new ideas to try with kids, and we wish you and your loved ones continued good health and safety. Stay tuned—later this week, we’ll share a roundup of distance learning resources for K-12 educators who are now teaching remotely. Please let us know how else the Inclusion Lab can support you in the weeks to come!

MORE FREE RESOURCES

20 Stress-Busters for Young Children (designed for early childhood classrooms, but many of the activities can be adapted for home use)

24 Ways to Have Fun with Math at Home

Sample ASQ-3 Learning Activity Sheets 

Sample ASQ:SE-2 Learning Activity Sheets 

EXPLORE THE BOOKS

The activities in this post were adapted from and inspired by the following books:

Activities 1 and 8: Let’s Talk About Math by Donna Kotsopoulos and Joanne Lee

Activities 2 and 3: Connecting Through Talk by David K. Dickinson & Ann B. Morse

Activities 2, 4, 9, 15, and 22: Talk to Me, Baby! by Betty Bardige

Activities 5-7: Blended Practices for Teaching Young Children in Inclusive Settings, Second Edition, by Jennifer Grisham-Brown, Mary Louise Hemmeter, and Kristie Pretti-Frontczak

Activities 10, 11, 14, and 16: ASQ®-3 Learning Activities by Elizabeth Twombly and Ginger Fink

Activities 12, 17, and 18: Early Literacy in Action by Betty H. Bunce

Activities 13, 19, and 24:  ASQ®:SE-2 Learning Activities by Elizabeth Twombly, Leslie Munson, and Lois Pribble

Activities 20,21, and 23: Little Kids, Big Worries by Alice Sterling Honig

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Educational program for children. Preschool education program

The period of education and upbringing of a preschooler is the foundation from which the child’s personality begins to form, the basis for building his successful future. The educational program for preschool children should cover three areas: mental development, moral and physical education.

Mental development of a preschooler

Determined by the degree:

• pencil and brush proficiency;
• ability to write and read;
• the ability to make a short retelling and memorize small verses;
• knowledge of numbers (in forward and reverse order), ability to perform simple arithmetic operations;
• knowledge of basic geometric shapes;
• ability to tell time;
• possession of initial ideas about the surrounding world.

Moral education

How a child knows how to behave in a group of peers and adults, how ready he is to learn, his future school life largely depends. Therefore, the program of preschool education should be built in such a way as not to lose sight of this aspect.

Educational programs for children. Developing computer programs. ..

Physical training

As Dr. Komarovsky said: “A happy child is first of all a healthy child. And only then – able to read and play the violin. Therefore, children’s training programs are inconceivable without elements of physical culture.

Teaching children 2-3 years old

This age is characterized by an intensive acquaintance of the child with the outside world, the colors and shapes of objects, their sizes and textures. The kid is able to vividly express emotions, respond to his successes and failures, communicate with other children and adults. During this age period, you should not be zealous in teaching the child letters and numbers, since all this for him is incomprehensible hieroglyphs that do not cause any interest. Also, the effectiveness of learning foreign languages ​​will be much higher at a later age.

Development of children aged 3-4 years: features, norms, programs and methods

The educational program for children should be aimed at understanding the world around them with the help of the senses: sight, hearing, smell and touch. Scientists have proven that success in mastering reading skills directly depends on the ability to feel the world. The preschool education program for children aged 2 and 3 is based on the development of fine motor skills. The fact is that a child’s fingers contain a large number of receptors that send impulses to areas of the brain that are simultaneously responsible for the coordination of finger movements and for the development of speech. For these purposes, finger gymnastics, sorting out small objects (safe, of course), playing with cubes and balls of various sizes, exercising with scraps of fabrics of various textures, playing “patties”, “magpie-crow”, modeling from plasticine and so on are perfect. Further.

It is worth paying due attention to physical exercises, accompanied by nursery rhymes and jokes. In general, any activity of a baby at this age should take place in a playful way – this is the most effective method for him to know the world and learn at this stage of development.

Teaching children 4-5 years old

This age is perfect for gently starting to teach your child letters and numbers. Now the baby is already able to analyze the properties of objects, purposefully influence them, he is more calm, assiduous and better organized. If a child can enthusiastically play educational games for 10-15 minutes – go ahead! The age of 4-5 years is also ideal for sending your child to some kind of circle or sports section. By this time, the physical development of the child’s musculoskeletal system allows him to successfully master the basics of swimming, choreography, martial arts, and so on.

Program for animation: a complete overview, description, instructions and…

If you notice a child’s propensity for linguistics, learning a foreign language or attending a theater group will be an excellent solution for developing these abilities. Sculpting, fine arts, vocals are perfect for creative kids. However, if the child still does not know how to focus attention, consciously perform developmental tasks, is impatient and reacts violently to his own failures, you should wait a bit with reading and visiting circles.

Making crafts together will help your child learn to concentrate. You should start with simple details so that the result is quick, gradually complicating the task. In the course of work, it is important to show the baby that any failure can be corrected. The study of the alphabet, numbers and animals can easily be included in this process. With a little imagination, you can kill several birds with one stone. For the development of fine motor skills, it is advisable to use exercises such as passing a pen through a labyrinth, tracing and coloring pictures, weaving, modeling, and much more.

Teaching children aged 6-7

Modern physiologists, psychologists, teachers and speech therapists agree that this period is most favorable for the development of attention, perception, memory and thinking of a child. Physiologically, the baby is already ready for developmental learning, and he has a desire to learn. That is why a six-year-old child is sometimes able to bring his parents to white heat with his many “whys”. Brushing off your inquisitive child or limiting yourself to superficial answers is like depriving a tree of life-giving moisture. So be patient and find the complete information to satisfy your little one’s curiosity. At this age, it’s time to teach your child to count, write, tell time by the clock, explain to him the basics of geography and astronomy. The educational program for children of 6 years old already provides for the transition to organized forms of classes.

Correct actions of parents

So, the program of preschool education of each child should include games-exercises for the development of sensory perception (development of the sense organs), speech, mental activity, physical skills, for the education of curiosity, as well as for the formation of general elementary ideas about the world around. Various institutions of preschool education help to successfully solve this problem. Kindergartens, preschool groups and specialized educational institutions not only use effective programs and unique methods to prepare children for school, but also have additional courses in their arsenal, such as English language training programs.

Undoubtedly, teaching a child in a team has a number of advantages over individual lessons: it develops the skills of correct interaction with peers, develops discipline, the concept of responsibility, and the ability to resolve difficult situations. Interactive educational programs, as well as the work of psychologists, will undoubtedly help the child in the future to adapt more easily to new school conditions and quickly move to the position of “I am a student.”

Of course, each baby is different, and it is also quite possible to achieve the desired results without outside help. If you have firmly decided that your independent studies with a child will be no worse than a training program for children in preschool educational institutions, just take into account the age-related characteristics of the baby’s psychology and adhere to certain rules.

Recommendations for parents

• Conduct learning in a playful way and use every opportunity for this: read to the baby, communicate, invent games together, look for objects of the same color on a walk, show him interesting natural phenomena, keep the child’s curiosity, teach him to operate time.
• Be sure to ensure that your child communicates with peers. These should be systematic joint games on playgrounds, in the park, arranging contests, quizzes, and relay races for kids. All this will be the first skills of the child’s behavior within the team.
• It is worth starting to teach a child to read only when his oral speech is developed to a sufficient degree. Start again with game forms, gradually moving to more complex ones. Remember that in this case, it is not so much the duration that is important, but the frequency and sequence of classes. Literature for reading should correspond to the age and individual characteristics of the baby – read what he is interested in knowing. If the child’s speech contains many errors in the syllabic structure of words or their agreement, has obvious pronunciation defects, then your initial task is to contact a speech therapist.
• In no case should you abruptly transfer a child to a school regime: deprive him of a quiet hour, arrange home lessons with notebooks, calls and breaks. Everything that educational programs for schoolchildren provide for in the upbringing of a preschooler is not only unnecessary, but can also cause certain harm – being forcibly involved in adult life, the child may lose desire and interest in school life.

Educational program for children

Teaching children is not easy, especially when it consists of boring and not interesting lessons. And every loving parent who wants his child to receive the necessary knowledge at school will himself explain, control and check certain lessons given at home.

However, parents do not always have time to help their child in the learning process, and even more so to make it as interesting as possible. In this case, in this case, a training program for children called “Example” can help.

Instead of parents, this educational program can help the child memorize the multiplication table or foreign words faster, check knowledge when writing spelling in Russian, ask and check examples for addition and subtraction, show and explain how to do subtraction and multiplication with a column and operations with fractions .

In addition to the above, this program also contains the following tasks to perform: expressions with brackets, vowels and consonants, comparing numbers, comparing fractions, rounding numbers, converting values.

Since the level of knowledge of children is different, accordingly, this educational program for children allows you to adjust the level of difficulty for each child. In addition to the fact that it is much more interesting for children to perform various exercises and tasks in the “Primerchik” program, it also puts marks for completing certain tasks.

For children to do everything to the end, the program has built-in parental control in the form of passwords for the program and email messages. The need for passwords lies in the fact that the program can work in forced mode and turn on at the point of loading the operating system. It will prevent the child from logging into the system and playing games or watching cartoons until he has completed the set number of exercises.

Accordingly, you can close or get into the settings of the “Primerchik” only by entering the password. The password is entered during the installation process, where a window appears where you should enter the password.

Then the next window appears, where you need to confirm the password and enter the email address where the child’s progress reports will be sent.

In the next window, if desired, you can turn on the forced mode, which will launch the “Primerchik” program along with turning on the computer. Here you need to select the desired account in the operating system and check the box against it, or you can choose nothing, then the program will be forced to start, like all other applications.

In the final window of the installation process, a list of tasks will appear that you can select and immediately activate them. And after clicking next, you can immediately start learning. Tasks can also be removed or added through the program settings, which naturally can only be accessed by entering a password.