By Ms Charlotte Butcher, HIS Preschool Coordinator
Here are some activities to do with your preschool children over the holiday break. They are very simple, using items that you should have in your home. These activities are simple but still educational!
1. Play Shops
You’ll need: plastic bags, old receipts and anything you can find from the food cupboards.
- Collect some things to ‘sell’ in your at-home supermarket and set up tins and packets in your shop.
- Let your family wander around and pick up the things they need and pack their items away for them into a plastic bag.
- Don’t forget to give them a receipt!
2. Storm in A Jar Experiment
You’ll need: a large glass jar, shaving foam, pipette or eye dropper, food colouring, 1 or more small cups.
- Mix up some food colouring with water in your small cup(s) – create as many cups of coloured water as you’d like.
- Fill the large jar about 3/4 full with water.
- Right before you’re about to do the experiment, top the jar with shaving cream until it’s just above the rim – this will be your cloud.
- From there, keep dropping coloured water on top of the shaving cream and keep an eye on what’s happening below.
- When the shaving cream cloud gets too heavy, the colours will start to seep through like rain, just like what happens with real clouds.
3. Create an Obstacle Course
You can never go wrong with an obstacle course, and they’re a great way to improve coordination and motor skills.
- You’ll need: furniture and any fun activities you can think of.
- Set up a course all around the house with a range of different activities and motions, from jumping between sofas and throwing ping pong balls into a bucket to collecting Lego bricks along the way.
- The best part? It can be set up entirely indoors if it’s a rainy day.
4. Make Tape Roads for Your Toy Cars
- You’ll need: electrical tape and toy cars.
- Lay out electrical tape on the floor to create roads for toy cars to drive on.
- Why not add bowls for roundabouts and different coloured post-it notes for houses?
5. Go On a Word Hunt
- You’ll need a magazine or newspaper and a highlighter.
- Choose a word and hunt for it in your magazine or newspaper, highlighting it whenever you spot it.
- To make things slightly trickier for older kids, you could go on a hunt for specific types of words like adjectives or adverbs, or highlight different things in different colours.
6. Build-a-Snack
- Have your child help you prepare a snack for the family and challenge them to use as many colours as they can.
- Grab some healthy options and have the child lay them out on a plate in a design they like. They will be proud of their delicious creation.
7. Make your Own Puzzle
- This WikiHow tutorial explains how to turn a family photo, a photo of your favourite pet, television show or characters from your favourite book into a DIY puzzle.
- It’s a great way to get the kids crafting in lockdown and the step-by-step guide in the link below makes it a super simple activity:
- How to make a homemade photo puzzle
8. Pancake Flipping Contest
- Pancake Day for 2021 might be over for now, but that doesn’t mean the fun has to stop! Get kids back into the kitchen and excited about cooking again with a pancake flipping contest.
- It’s minimal mess with maximum fun. See who can flip the most pancakes then tuck in and enjoy the delicious crepes, American pancakes or Scotch pancakes for lunch, dinner or dessert. Whatever you fancy!
- It’s a game that’s cheap to pull together and suitable for kids of all ages as you can always move the pancake from a hot pan into a cold one before little ones get flipping. For a simple pancake recipe, please follow the link here: https://www.carolinescooking.com/british-pancakes/
9. Scavenger Hunt
- Come up with a list of odd and fun items for your kids to find. They can hunt around the house or your garden.
- Suggested items can be: a cancelled stamp, a straw, a rubber band, a penny dated in a particular decade (before the kids were born, or perhaps have them find one in the year the birthday child was born), a toothpick, etc.
10. Flying Paper Planes
- Use up all that scrap paper that was destined for the recycling and build a fleet of paper airplanes. Then you can launch them from an upstairs window, or in the back garden. You could make different kinds and see which one flies the farthest.
- Check out these easy paper planes to make:
- How to Make 3 EASY Paper Airplanes that Fly Far
