Young children thrive in an ordered environment where they understand what is expected of them and a lack of structure can make them anxious so making a timetable to their day might help.

It is hard for children to understand why there is no pre-school so give them simple explanations of why we have to stay at home.

Focus on what they can do to help like washing their hands and coughing into their sleeves

Keeping active will help relieve the boredom of lockdown so in the garden practise throwing and catching, kicking a ball, balancing on one leg, hopping or skipping. Have you got room to draw out a hopscotch game? These activities will all help your child’s co-ordination and balance.

Inside children could practice dressing themselves and doing up fastenings. Punch holes in an old card and try threading with laces, manipulating puzzle pieces, cutting with scissors or using tongs to move pasta between bowls.

Talk about germs and hygiene in an simple non threatening way and practise hand washing, blowing noses and how to cough  safely

You probably have lots of books with animals in at home; books can be a great source of entertainment. Older children could make their own stories, chose a toy and pretend it travels to a special place for an adventure.

Encourage the children to recognise letters by their phonic sound, maybe look for letters on road signs when you are out for a walk. Children who know their phonics could maybe play I-spy.

Let children practise writing in shaving foam, sand, soil etc and watching adults writing makes for good role models!

Drawing, colouring, painting, sticking,   modelling are all wonderful creative activities.

If talking about animals encourage the children to talk about colour and texture, describing  their fur, their scales or their shell.

If you have chalk let the children draw on paths and patios or maybe let them spray water onto a painting to see what happens (do this outside!)

Cut up pictures from magazines to make collages or mix corn flour and water together on a tray and add drops of colouring to make patterns.

Maybe build a den or camp indoors or dress up in swimming costumes and snorkels and pretend to swim under the sea looking for mermaids or sea creatures!

Conversations with adults are very important to a child’s speech and language development so time spent talking and playing together will be invaluable.

Look at books and talk about the details in the pictures.

Maybe sing some animal songs (the children know lots!) or encourage them to recite nursery rhymes maybe leaving off the last word to see if they know the rhyming word. Repetition of words helps young children to increase their vocabulary.

Older children could maybe try inventing nonsense rhymes e.g. hickory dickory dee, a bee sat on my knee!

Construction toys offer opportunities to make endless models.

Playing with small world toys such as farm sets and cars allow the children to act out things from their own experiences.

During Spring, encourage the children to look for changes in the environment such as blossom, leaf buds, sprouting bulbs etc. Maybe grow some seeds?

Perhaps look for mini beasts or butterflies in the garden or make a bird feeder to watch the wildlife.

At the pre-school, we would have been talking about new life so maybe talk to your children about the names of animals in family groups e.g. sheep/lamb or cow/calf

Sing songs that have animals and numbers in e.g. three little monkeys helping the children to count the numbers on their fingers. Practise counting objects, 2 shoes, three buttons etc.

Look for nmbers on houses when out for a walk, can they guess what number will be on the next house?

Look for 2D shapes in the house, cut some out and make pictures. Older children could look for 3D shapes such as cubes, cuboids or cylinders in the larder.

Maybe do some  cooking, letting the children weigh out ingredients or if you have balancing scales then you can weigh all sorts of things to work out which is heavier!

• Look for pictures of different animals and group them into jungle, farm, pets etc
• Paint on a outside wall with a large brush and water
• Play board games to encourage concentration, turn taking, sharing and counting
• Make salt dough (recipes on line)
• Use food colouring whilst cooking spaghetti, you can play with it when it goes cold!
• Look in magazines for patterns, spots, stripes etc, cut them out and make a collage
• Print off dot to dot puzzles for older children to help with number recognition and pencil control