Curated home-school activities & learning resources for pre-school to year 1 - to use during lockdown

Drawing on experience as an ICT teacher and working with an excellent primary school teacher, I’ve put together a Trello board with curated home-school activities and learning resources ideal for pre-school kids and up to Year 1.

Click here for Homeschool Activities & Learning Resources (pre-school to Year 1) >>

There’s no doubt about it we are currently in strange, uncertain and unprecedented times.

There's also suddenly a huge amount of pressure on parents to be working from home, parenting and home schooling their children simultaneously whilst navigating the considerable impact of this global crisis. This is certainly a time when we will appreciate ALL our front-line key workers more than ever, including our talented and patient teachers.

Suddenly having to become a home-school teacher amidst a global pandemic is challenging for ANYONE, but particularly when you have a school aged child in Reception and a younger pre-schooler or toddler, and when neither of them can do any self-directed learning because they can’t yet read.

Younger children tend not to have access to a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and self-directed e-learning resources for this very reason, but the challenge is real. How do you keep two young children occupied simultaneously whilst the schools and childcare are shut during the Coronavirus outbreak?

Many schools, pre-schools and nurseries (such as my own children’s) have been fantastic at providing lots of ideas and digital resources and no doubt you’ve had an abundance of shared links via channels like Facebook and WhatsApp groups. To save you valuable time, we’ve curated a comprehensive list of home-school activities & learning resources for parents with young children (pre-school to Year 1) to help keep you sane.

This Trello board of activities and resources is totally free and every activity is colour coded by suitability for Reception kids, pre-schoolers or toddlers and older kids. You can add comments and tips on what’s worked for you and you can also vote for your favourites. Trello is a such great free digital tool to manage and organise literally anything.

It’s worth pointing out to anyone that might be feeling more than a little stressed about our new home-schooling role, especially to Learning & Development professionals who might feel an increased pressure to be able to rise to the challenge, that our fantastic school teachers (admittedly dealing with 30 kids at a time on a daily basis) don’t normally have to teach and entertain different aged kids with differing developmental needs whilst also cooking their meals, keeping the house clean and running another job on top (possibly even having to navigate remote home working for the first time)!

These curated resources are certainly not designed to make you feel under pressure to be Mary Poppins, but instead provide a central place where you can quickly find an idea, an activity or resource when you most need it. In a time of crisis, like the one we currently find ourselves in, our focus should be on being agile and adaptable, and surviving using whatever tools we have at our disposal. It’s not necessarily realistic to follow well intended timetables aimed at older children, but what you can do is find an activity from the board that can suitably entertain different aged children simultaneously. Remember that with a growth mindset we can adapt and develop a strategy that works for us, for our own family circumstances to build skills and resilience. (Growth mindset self-talk goes like this - ‘I’m not good at this YET’, ‘what can I learn from this?’ and ‘I’ll get better with practice’). Perhaps adaptability and the power of a growth mindset might be the greatest gifts we can teach our kids during this period anyway?

The board is divided into lists of home learning resources, phonics & literacy, maths, nature & physical, indoor play, cooking ideas with kids, arts & crafts and the much needed topic of wellbeing. Top choices for me tend to be the activities suitable for pre-schoolers and toddlers as even the older kids seem to love these. For example, finding lots of natural materials in the garden or on a walk to make a mandala (a geometric design) or a nature collage, doing a ‘sound’ scavenger hunt or an indoor colour challenge.

Good luck! We're all in it together and learning as we go along.

Click here for the Homeschool Activities & Learning Resources (pre-school to Year 1) >>

About me:

I am a Digital Learning Consultant, an e-Learning specialist and former ICT teacher with two young children aged 6 and 3. I’ve co-created this curated Trello board with Sinead McNichol, an experienced Primary School teacher and Young Enterprise facilitator who also has two young children, aged 6 and 2.

For expert help on your digital learning strategy or on choosing and implementing online learning platforms contact Learn Fox for an initial chat to discuss how we can best support you.