Learn At Home: Helping Kids Enjoy School Activities Outside the Classroom

It’s true that formal schooling environments provide exceptional learning and development opportunities for children. Whether your child attends kindergarten in Olney, preschool in Rockville, or day care in Gaithersburg MD, they’ll benefit from greater mental, emotional, and physical development, than peers who don’t have those learning options. However, learning is an ongoing process that must not be confined only inside the school. 

Learning Outside School

Formal school settings provide natural learning opportunities. Kids benefit from professional oversight; but they also have plenty of opportunity to engage with children their own age. But most children will spend more time, during a typical day, outside school than they do inside. And while professional day care staff apply unique teaching strategies and techniques to develop young minds, there’s a lot that parents can do at home to continue that learning momentum. Here are three engaging learning activities that you can try at home:

 

– Reading Books

If you do a walk-through in any center providing high-quality child care in Bethesda MD, the first thing you’ll likely notice is books. There’ll be colourful books of all shapes and sizes. From comics to graphic characters, and from nature subjects to alphabets and numerology – you’ll see them all displayed in splendor – and perhaps laid out on the floor and desks! Kids’ eyes light-up at the sight of books. You too can replicate that feeling at home. 

Surround your child with books – talking books, singing ones, musical books and books with pop-outs and cut-outs. Like at school, the “livelier” and animated the books are, the more engaged your child will be in reading and interacting with the book. The thing about book-related activities is, they offer benefits at multiple levels. They teach, they engage and they entertain. But they also offer excellent self-development opportunities for kids.  

 

– Singalongs 

Another engaging activity that caregivers at any infant day care in Rockville MD engage in, with kids in school, is singing. Children love singing, and with a teacher or trained caregiver in attendance, they don’t just learn things, but they also enjoy themselves when doing it. As a parent, you too can encourage your children to continue what they learned at school. Some classic sing-along songs, at home or during road trips, include:

– Baa Black Sheep

– The ABC song

– Old Macdonald Had a Farm

– The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round 

– Heads, Shoulders Knees and Toes

A great idea, when using singalongs at home, is to also act the words of the song – like pointing to hands, nose, knees etc., when singing the “Heads, Shoulders…” song. While being entertaining, family singalongs at home offer excellent bonding opportunities between parents and kids.  

 

– Writing Practice 

While most Olney daycare centers use expensive teaching devices and technologies, there are several affordable home-based writing aids that parents can tap into. Use Etch-a-sketch tablets, crayons, pencil and paper, chalk and blackboard, and tracing paper to do writing exercises with your children. Schools even use play-dough and slime to teach children how to “create” alphabets and words – activities that you can easily mimic at home too!  

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