Fairy tales are such an important part of childhood, helping children explore emotions, and think about experiences in the big wide world from the safe and secure environment of home. Make a set of DIY fairy tale fridge magnets for some fun storytelling of your own.
Welcome to day five of our activities for toddlers series. We’ve already looked at sensory play, arts and crafts, maths games and imaginary play and today we have some lovely playful ideas for reading, writing and songs that are just right for toddlers.
My daughter is interested in learning how to read so I’m always looking for ways to add words in to our play. She enjoys reading books, but she’s still at the stage where that can feel like hard work sometimes. Adding words into our play gives her lots of opportunities to practice reading but it feels much more like fun than a lesson. Here’s a very simple but effective way to add in some reading to a story telling and art play time :: we’re using speech bubbles!
We are very fond of Pippi Longstocking in our house and her inspiration is seen in lots of different ways – from her encouragement to climb trees, through the idea that fun and creativity is rarely tidy to our latest passion: turnupstuffing.
Do you know Pippi? She’s nine years old, lives by herself and doesn’t go to school. Her mother has died and her father is a Cannibal King. And she’s celebrated in a series of books by Astrid Lindgren. She is also an expert at turnupstuffing – and so are my kids!
What’s a turnupstuffer? [Read more…]
Are you going to celebrate World Book Day with your children on 1st March?
It’s a worldwide celebration of children’s books and reading and marked in over 100 countries around the globe.
Books are such a fun springboard in to all sorts of activities, crafts and play. Here are our favourite World Book Day ideas for you to try.
How to use Star Wars to teach literacy?
I’m always on the look out for opportunities I can offer the children to get them interested in writing. Sitting rather reluctant writers down with a blank piece of paper and a pencil and saying ‘let’s write a story’ doesn’t work for us – but adding writing in to play or setting up a invitation which sparks their interest does.
Create your own opening crawl
This idea for creating a story on a roll popped into my head when I was thinking about a different way for us to use our easel. Adding a long roll of paper to the easel made me think of the opening credits to Star Wars, when the text crawls up the screen and I thought we could use it all summer long to create a story.