*This is a contributed post*
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Kids learn through play and experience and giving them the best opportunities doesn’t necessarily means spending a lot of money going out to different places. Home is an ideal location to learn all sorts of life skills like cooking, being creative and learning independently.
As a parent, finding new ways to entertain and educate your children can be a challenge, especially when they are more interested in watching cartoons than doing homework. Luckily there are a few tricks you can have up your sleeve to make learning fun.
Cooking
It’s a rare child who turns down the opportunity to make cakes and a simple refrigerator cake is an easy way to engage them in the process. There are lots of great recipes online for chocolate fridge cake that are easy to do with children. You will need to melt the chocolate, but other than that, let them get stuck in with adding and mixing ingredients in. Once you have the knack for this type of cake, you could try all sorts of different ingredients and combinations and try writing out recipe cards to keep for a later time.
Make and Do
Kids never pass up the opportunity to get sticky with glue and glitter so having a box full of bits and bobs is a great idea for creative play. Try using a shoebox to make a shoebox theatre together and encourage your children to make up characters and stories to perform. Toilet rolls are a great addition to any craft box and there are so many things you can make with them, your kids will be busy for hours! Of course, you don’t have to aim for anything in particular and lots of kids learn through experimentation. Let them loose with a variety of papers, stickers, funky scissors and glue and see what they come up with when their imaginations run wild.
Fun Apps
There are thousands of apps that are aimed to entertain and educate kids. A safe app for kids is a brilliant way for them to gain confidence using technology as well as build on their studies at school. Play together to start with and then let them use their intuition to continue playing on their own.
Read Together
If a teacher could ask one thing of a parent, it is to read to their young children for just 15 minutes a day. Reading together is the best way to help your child’s speaking and listening as well as gradually improving their reading skills. Stories are also perfect for social development as they trigger conversations about how characters interact. Understanding people and their motives should help to increase your chil
d’s confidence as they mature into young adults.
Learning at home doesn’t have to be expensive or boring, in fact the best ways are often active and fun. Taking time to play with your kids and sometimes leaving them with an unstructured activity will help their creativity to blossom.