Little Acorns at Home

Having your children at home whilst you may be working from home can be interesting, fun and a challenge. Fun is good! Laughing is good! It will be a good idea to be realistic about what can be achieved in your time together, you can't do everything. But certainly do not feel bad about having fun! Establish a routine over the day for snacks, meal times, play on your own times and play together times, rest times, TV times and screen times. When children know that there will be time together, or that screen tie is scheduled, they will be less demanding. You could make a paper plate 'clock' with a hand saying where they are. You might like to use a Now Next Then card, so that children can relax knowing that they are playing on their own for a while, and that you will be playing with them 'Next'. We can help parents to set this up. For older children add a time when they will be playing on their own allowing you to have some time to work with little interruption. This page gives you some ideas as to how you can organise play to encourage children to be creative, independent and confident with their own ideas.

Treasure Basket
To keep children’s interest, to nurture inquisitive, investigative behaviour and curiosity, we use Treasure Baskets. They encourage children to explore unusual and different things, a theme, or a focus, or a schema and lead to new discoveries. All you need is a lovely basket, round is best as they can approach from any side, but it doesn’t matter that much. Then have fun filling it with odd things, try… ‘sense of smell’, ‘light and heavy’, ‘feel this’, sparkle and shine’, ‘sense of time’, ‘sound of music’, ‘light and colour’, ‘rainbows’, ‘rolling along’, ‘the bathroom basket’, ‘will it float?’, ‘Easter’, ‘spring time’, ‘magnetic’, ‘brushes’. These are just ideas, but use what you have or can find—different spoons, wooden items, shells etc. Children will enjoy looking at and handling different textures, sounds, shapes, colours and smells. If your little ones are little and like to put things in their mouth, don’t have dangerous or sharp items that they can chew or swallow. Ideally if an adult can be on hand that is great, but if you can’t then choose safe things that can be looked at independently according to age/stage.

What is a Schema?
Schemas are usually described as repeated patterns of behaviour, that we see when watching children play and investigate their surroundings. They can be referred to as their ‘interests’ too, and it shows how they learn.
Some schemas you might see include:
Transporting: carrying toys from one place to another in a truck, pram, bag, purse, box , wheelbarrow or hands
Positioning: choosing to line /position /sit themselves/toys very carefully, cars, people, animals, dinosaurs, bricks, sorting and separating, being very specific, correcting,
Orientation: looking at things from different angles using binoculars, magnifiers, lenses, kaleidoscopes, lying down to draw
Enclosure: making fences and borders, with bricks, blocks, crates, paints, cutting, sticking, chalks, paper
Enveloping: or wrapping, toys and themselves in material , paper, scarves, play silks, dressing up clothes, envelopes
Rotation: keys, knobs, buttons, wheels, taps , cogs, seeing how they work, cars, trucks, rolling, rolling toys and parts
Transforming: mixing paint, mud pies, mixing sand and water, interest in how ice melts and freezes
Containing: climbing into boxes, filing boxes, pockets, containers, prams, buckets, handbags, suitcases, trucks, wheelbarrows
Connecting: joining with glue string, duplo, waffle, stickle , mega bricks, tape,
Trajectory: dropping food/bowl/cups from highchair, swinging, kicking balls, throwing toys/items, pulling out tissues, running backwards and forwards, building/knocking down towers
Going through a boundary: threading beads, crawling in tunnels, posting, weaving, latching, locking, doors, sieving
Core and radial: drawing circles and lines, sunshine, making birthday cakes with candles/hedgehogs/dragons in dough/clay