School is definitely the ideal place for learning and growing while teachers do their best to
equip every student with the necessary knowledge and tools in order to thrive. However,
when your child is at home, you become their teacher. This, of course, does not mean you
should turn your house into a classroom but to consider imaginative, interesting, and
engaging learning projects and tasks which are, at the same time, fun. There are many
stimulating activities you can easily do at home and make them part of your daily routine.
Practicing math during mealtimes
If your children enjoy being part of the cooking and meal preparation process, then you have
the perfect opportunity to enhance their math skills. Specifically, you can use various
materials and types of food such as pasta, different sizes of cans, and spices to practice their
skills on counting, measuring, estimating, comparing, and recognizing shapes. Also, you may
ask your kid to measure, weigh, count cups, or even convert units of measurement of certain
ingredients when, for example, you are making a cake. Another effective activity is to count
how many plates and utensils are needed for the whole family as well as to estimate the food
quantity that each family member may consume. After the meal, you can ask your child to
count how many dishes can fit in the dishwasher or enumerate how many steps the entire
meal preparation process requires.
Cultivate math and science in your garden!
When the weather is nice and sunny, you can go out in the garden to get some vitamin D,
fresh air and, simultaneously, seize the chance to teach your kids some math and science.
There are many fun activities you can try, such as to plant seeds in order to observe and
record their growth. Even if you live in an apartment with a balcony, you can start a
windowsill garden with your kids, where they can insert and measure soil into small pots,
count plant seeds, and make their own predictions about which seeds may sprout first or
become the tallest plants. Generally, it is very beneficial for children to observe and record
plant growth as they learn how to assume responsibilities and understand the concept of cause
and effect.
Turn Your Home into a Science Lab
One of the most fun activities for young children is performing science experiments. For
involving your children in such experiments, thankfully, you do not need a chemistry lab in
your own home or to risk your safety! Children enjoy the simplest things, such as creating
shapes from gumdrops and toothpicks or putting a few drops of color food in a shallow bowl
of milk and use a Q-tip to watch the colors swirling around forming the most amazing shapes
and color combinations.
Expand your knowledge of other countries and cultures
It is very important to raise children that are open minded and embrace other customs and
cultures. For succeeding this, you don’t need to spend a fortune on traveling around the
world. You can experience various different cultures in the comfort of your own home. For
example, you can try new cuisines and learn about the influences and possible meanings of
certain food, or you can listen and dance to popular songs of other countries. What’s more,
you can play games that help you learn the basics of some foreign languages. Another
interesting educational game is to ask your children to blindly point out a place on a map and
think of a related activity to that specific place.
Bond over NASA livestream
At some point, most children become greatly interested in other planets, aliens, astronauts
and have all sort of queries like how they can travel up to space and how spaceships look
like. A brilliant way to help your children find answers to some of these questions is
by watching NASA Live Stream where they can see views from the International Space
Station and, in some occasions, even see astronauts moving around in their space suits
exploring other planets!
Although school and classroom lessons are essential for your children’s education, you can
enhance their learning with different types of activities to help them get excited, discover
many different new things and, most importantly, have fun while doing this.
RMHC Cyprus® vision is to keep families together and enable parents to support their
children during hard times. We constantly try to fulfill our goals by providing a home away
from home to the families of hospitalized children. For continuing to support even more
families in need, we appreciate every help and donation. We value all contributions and we
do not consider any help to be “little” or “insignificant”.
Learn more about our work and how you can support by clicking here.