Personal Social and Emotional Development

1. Personal Social and Emotional Development How to help at home • Games that teach taking turns are always valuable. • If you have been to a celebration, family occasion, event or festival – encourage your child to bring in photos or items and they can discuss it at nursery and school. • Encourage them to ask questions about what they see or do – and remember that you don’t always have to have the answers but you can investigate them together. • Talk to your child about everyday events, such as what they see and do. • Listen to your child – especially if they seem unsettled or anxious. Let us know as well – we can also keep an eye on your child. • It is also important for us to know if anything has happened to your child at school – as children learn about friendships, incidents can happen and we take these very seriously so please do tell us.

2. Physical Development How to help at home • You already do lots of this – riding a bike, going to the park and using the swings, playing football or catch in the garden. • Encourage and help your child to use tools such as scissors, sellotape, paint brushes, hammers, screwdrivers etc. • Fun and messy activities are great – cooking biscuits and rolling out the dough, using flour on a table and making patterns with fingers or shaving foam!

3. Communication and Language How to help at home • Any activities like shopping, cooking, building things etc provide wonderful opportunities for language. Describing what gooey mixture feels like, talking through what is on the shopping list etc. • Share books daily. Ask your child to talk about the front cover, the pictures, what the story is about, predicting what might happen on the next page, retelling the story or making up your own endings. • Making up rhymes using rhyming words and patterns such as ‘at’, ‘og’ For example – at fat cat hat rat sat mat –a fat cat sat on a mat wearing a hat. • Sing lots of songs and changing the words with different rhymes – bananas in pyjamas, kippers in slippers, grapes in capes. • Play feely bag games where your child has to describe what they can feel.

4. Literacy How to help at home • Let them see you writing and tell them what you are writing and why. • Make sure you have paper, pencils, crayons etc available for your child to use. • Encourage them to use writing when they are playing. • Point out writing when out, such as shop signs, road signs, prices, timetables and talk about its purpose. • Scribe for your child when they describe their picture so that they can see what writing should look like. • Make books and cards. • Practise writing their name. • READ, READ, READ, READ, READ! • Share books with your child daily. • Talk about the book – what is it about, what will happen next, how will it end. • Retell the story using the pictures. • Use the pictures to tell the story and discuss what is happening in each one. Pictures are a vital clue to working out words. • Let the children see you reading. You are an important role model to them so let them know what you are reading and why. • Take them to the library. It is a cheap way of ensuring that your child has a supply of good quality books. • Look for signs when out such as MacDonalds, warning signs, road signs etc. • The computer is a great way to motivate children to read without them even knowing it, so if you have one, use it. • Children also need their own reading choices and comics are a good way for motivating children! • Keep it fun. Making children sit down to do their reading can be a chore so pick a time when your child is willing and not tired.

5. Maths How to help at home • Look for numbers around the house or when out and discuss what they do, such as knowing which bus to catch by the number on the front. • Sing counting songs and rhymes. • Encourage your child to count objects such as how many pennies they have to spend on sweets or how many bricks they will need to make a wall. • Play counting games such as snakes and ladders or lotto. It is important that your child is able to use their numbers to 10 confidently before moving up to 20 or beyond, so please do spend time doing this first. • Encourage your child to find totals of sets such as how many sausages are on the plate, and how many roast potatoes, so how many altogether. • Role play shopping and encourage your child to count out the correct money for each item and then the total amount of pennies. • Talk about adding and subtracting wherever possible. • Play dominoes or use the dominoes to make simple sums by counting the amount of dots on each section and then how many altogether. • Encourage your child to help with cooking so that they can use scales and measuring jugs. • Weigh objects in the supermarket. • Use construction kits such as lego, duplo, etc. • Play treasure hunt games where you use positional language such as ‘it is beside the chair and on top of the table’. • Look for shapes and patterns around the home or outside such as triangular road sign, cylinder tins etc. • Talk about time by discussing what day of the week it is, what they are going to do during the day, what time they will be doing something and pointing it out on the clock.

6. Understanding the World How to help at home • Encourage your child to bring in objects or photos when they attend a special occasion to talk to the class about. • Talk to your child about your own beliefs. • Talk to your child about differences and similarities between yourself and other cultures through stories, cooking, toys etc. Children are introduced to a huge world of differences when they watch television and this provides opportunities for talk if your child asks questions. • Look for seasonal changes in the garden. • Talk about how food changes as you make it – jelly, chocolate, cakes etc. • Have fun in the bath or sink finding things that float or sink. • Visits to the beach, farm, woods etc and talk about materials you find there. • Parks & gardens will provide a huge amount of wildlife and exploration opportunities – finding where the woodlice and worms live, looking for snails and spiders etc. • Encourage your child to ask questions and find out answers.

7. Expressive Arts and Design How to help at home • Encourage your child to paint or draw – finger painting, using flour and water. Glitter and sparkly pens can be quite an incentive! • Children can use the computer to draw – this helps if children find drawing quite difficult. • Role – play – children love this and simple things can be making a den using a sheet or just letting them use things around the home. When you do things, let your child watch you and explain what you are doing. Ideas could be washing the car, making a shopping list, folding the clothes, doing the washing. • Listen to music – all kinds and sing along! • Children can use items around the home as musical instruments – saucepan lids, hoover pipes with a stick to scrape along, spoons etc. (Do remember to get the aspirins for your headache with this one!)