Thanks so much to the wonderful teachers who contributed these ideas, which gives you some simple, engaging ideas for connecting with your child during times away from school or anytime they are with you! You may wish to read the ideas for the groups just younger and older than your child as well, as many of the suggestions can easily be adapted.
Primary children need real world physical work to do. Please don’t supplement with workbooks and online/phone learning. If you have a specific academic concern please reach out to your child’s teacher to learn how to supplement in a way that aligns with their classroom experience.
Bake or cook!
Have them use their hands! They need to carry, pinch, scrub, push, pull, roll.
Tell stories
Primary children need real world physical work to do. Please don’t supplement with workbooks and online/phone learning. If you have a specific academic concern please reach out to your child’s teacher to learn how to supplement in a way that aligns with their classroom experience.
Bake or cook!
- Share a family recipe: Think back to something you helped make as a child, share an old family recipe or tradition. Go SLOWLY! Let your child measure, pour, and crack the eggs. There will be a mess and possibly mistakes but focus on the joy of the experience and the lifelong memory you are creating. I promise mistakes and all, your children will DELIGHT in helping and in eating!!
- Let them prepare snack or lunch: Give them the freedom and see what they make! Observe from the side, helping only for safety.
- Follow your child. Let them be the experts! Do a puzzle and let them show you where the pieces go. Play a game and let them remind you of the rules. Answer their questions with “what do you think?” Or “how could we...”
Have them use their hands! They need to carry, pinch, scrub, push, pull, roll.
- Play with clay, actual hard clay they must soften with the warmth of their hands. Roll it, slice it with a butter knife, make cubes and spheres.
- Scrub dishes at the sink. Let them use a scrub brush to make tons of bubbles in the sink. It’s okay if only one plate or skillet gets “washed”.
- Use scissors to cut paper. Paste it, using glue in a small dish and a paintbrush as an applicator, to make a collage or another object.
- Color with crayons
- Drive toy cars, sort them by color, grade them by size.
- Sew a running stitch, sew buttons! This is the best handwriting support out there!
Tell stories
- The art of story-telling is quickly becoming lost. Children need to know stories aren’t only from books. Share stories from your childhood, from their infancy, of your favorite childhood toy, of family members they didn’t get to know.
- Use screen time as a portal to see something REAL that your child can come to know. Your birth to 6-year-old is making herself out of the world that surrounds her, including what is watched on a screen.
- Nature documentaries, videos of machinery working, a road being built etc., will delight and teach little ones.
- Watch videos of dances from other parts of the world then give them a try! Think Bollywood :)
- Find videos of things being made. A crayon factory, a toy car, a doll.
- Artists painting. Watch Bob Ross and both paint masterpieces.
- When all else fails, search Google or Pinterest for Montessori at Home and you’ll find TONS of great activities!!!