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Apr 11

4

Colour Activity

By admin | Activities

My daughter and I had a lot of fun with a creative art project that I would love to share in case you fancy having a go. There is ample opportunity for learning too and it makes a great homeschooling project. The idea started by accident really. We were doing some gardening. We were about to put all the leaves we had cut into the garden bin, when I suddenly thought, hold on, we could make something fun with these beautiful big leaves. We settled on the idea of making a colour garden by painting all of the leaves and creating a collage.

You just need the following items:

–        some leaves;
–        paint (acrylic paint works well);
–        water;
–        double sided sticky tape (or a normal tape which can be folded);
–        a large sheet of paper or card; and
–        a mix of different things to paint the leaves with (e.g. paint brushes, kitchen roll, a section of a scouring pad and whatever else you can think of).

In short, we collected some leaves, had lots of fun painting the leaves with lots of different tools and methods, and then created a collage on a large sheet of paper (we cut off a sheet of wrapping paper so we could get a nice size sheet).

home education activity idea

We had tubes of acrylic paint in the primary colours (blue, red and yellow) plus a tube of black and one of white. We made good use of these colours and we mixed lots of colours too (for example, we made purple by mixing blue and red, lilac by mixing blue, red and white and orange by mixing red and yellow).

homeschooling art and craft ideas

As well as exploring different colour mixes, we experimented with textures by painting the leaves with different tools and methods in addition to using different paintbrushes. For example, we screwed up a piece of kitchen roll into a ball, dunked this into some paint and then dabbed this onto the leaves. We also cut off a piece of a scouring pad and dabbed the paint on the leaves with this too. A really fun additional method we used (thanks to my mum for this suggestion) was to mix the acrylic paints with some water to make the paint much wetter. We then applied this to the leaves and hung them up to dry on the washing line. This created all sorts of fun patterns on the leaves as the paint travelled freely over the leaves. We had a hunt around the garden to see what else we could use and a stem from the Christmas tree in the garden worked a treat too.

home education art and craft activities early years

homeschool and home education art and craft activities

Once all of the leaves were dry, we then cut out a large piece of wrapping paper and had fun attaching all of the different leaves (some painted and some left natural) to the paper to create the colour garden. We applied the leaves to the paper with double sided tape.

As there are lots of different stages to this project, it’s a nice one to run over a couple of days. We started off doing some gardening and collecting the leaves one afternoon; the next afternoon we painted the leaves and left them out to dry; and the final afternoon we painted a few more and assembled all of the leaves to create the garden collage.

homeschool and home education craft activity ideas

To add a further learning angle to his project, here are some fun facts you can share with wise little ones about colours…

Fun facts about colours

Visible light is made of seven wavelength groups. These are the colours you see in a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Primary colours are blue, red and yellow. Primary colours cannot be made from other colours.

Secondary colours are made by mixing two primary colours. For example: If you mix red and yellow you get orange; if you mix blue and yellow you get green; and if you mix blue and red you get purple.

Colours like red, yellow and orange are considered warm colours and can make you feel calm and cosy. It is also believed that red causes people to feel angry.

Cool colours like blue, green and purple are also thought to make people feel calm and relaxed. In addition, blue is believed to make people feel sad (hence the term ‘feeling blue’).

Yellow is believed to make you hungry. This is why you will often see a lot of yellow in restaurant signs!

Some people are born without the ability to see all colours and are colour blind. They may be unable to tell the difference between certain colours like red and green, or they may not be able to see blue, for example.

Women can identify more shades of red than a man can.

The most popular colour in the world is blue!

Apr 04

4

Rainbow activity & fun facts

By admin | Nature

Rainbow science for kids

There is so much to learn about the beautiful rainbow. At the end of this blog you will find lots of rainbow fun facts all about these beauties. Firstly, we’re going to take a look at how you can create your very own rainbow. Not only that, but we’re also going to look at how you can make light bend (when you have a read through the fun facts you’ll discover why bending light is an important part of the formation of a rainbow).

How to make a rainbow

All you need is a garden hose, a sunny day and permission to head outside. You need to stand in a position where the sun is behind you. Next, you need to turn the hose on and put your thumb over the nozzle where the water comes out so that it comes out as a spray (or you might have one of those hoses where you can set it to the spray setting). Hold the hose out in front of you and spray the water out. You should start to see a rainbow forming. If this doesn’t work, you could try moving the hose up or down a bit. If it still isn’t working, you might need to wait until the sun is shining a bit more brightly as you need plenty of light for this experiment.

Watch light bend

As you’ll discover in the rainbow fun facts below, bending light is key to the formation of a rainbow. You can carry out your own experiment so that you can watch light bend. All you need is a table, a glass of water and a pencil.

Placed the glass of water on the table and put the pencil inside with part of it peeking out the top of the water. Firstly look at the pencil through the side of the glass. Then at the top of the glass. Then take the pencil back out of the water and look at it again. What difference did you notice? Did you notice that when you looked at the pencil through the side of the glass it looked bent? This happened because when light passes through the glass and water it hits your eye from different angles than it normally would and makes the pencil look bent.

Try also holding the pencil right up against the side of the glass that is nearest to you and then slowly move it to the other side of the glass. Can you notice any difference? The pencil should look bigger and bigger as it moves further away. This is because the more water there is between you and the pencil, the bigger the pencil will look!

Now let’s look at some fun facts about rainbows…

Rainbow fun facts

The rainbow is a multi-coloured arc appearing in the sky.

Rainbows are formed when light shines through water (e.g. like when the sun shines through the rain). This light is bent and reflected, like a reflection in a mirror, and this creates all of the colours that you see in a rainbow.

While rainbows normally appear from the rain, they can actually happen wherever light is being bent inside of water droplets (e.g. in mist, fog, spray, and dew).

Most of the time light looks white, but it is actually made up of seven colours. These are the colours that you see in the rainbow in the following order – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROY G BIV is a great way to remember these colours and their order). Issac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician. He identified the 7 colours of the visible spectrum that together make up white light.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to see a double rainbow (and very rarely a third and fourth). A “double rainbow” is caused by the light reflecting twice inside the water droplets.

I hope you enjoyed this fun learning topic about rainbows.

Mar 27

5

Word games

By admin | Top tips

My nine year old daughter and I love playing different word games that we have made up when out and about walking. We played these long before the big C came into all of our lives. I thought I’d share three of the games with you in case you might enjoy them too while you are looking for different ways to fill the time. They offer a nice relaxing idea for homeschooling too, which many of us have taken on at this time. So, here goes…

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The first game we play we have called The Animal Game. Here, one of us picks a random letter from the alphabet. It’s really important to pick the letter out quickly without thinking any further than this (my daughter always wants me to pick the letter out as she says she can’t help but think ahead of the answer). Then, the first person who comes up with an animal that begins with that letter wins that round. You can pick the same letter more than once, BUT, you have to come up with a new animal each time a letter is repeated. You can of course have other things as the theme for this game too. Yesterday, I said let’s do it with flowers. Little Wise Junior said, ‘Nooooo, I hardly know any flowers’. I persuaded her to give it a go and she surprised herself at how many flowers she did actually know.

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Another game we play we have called The Letter Game. Here, one of us picks a letter and the other person has to come up with a certain number of things they can see during the walk that begin with that letter. The rule is that both players must be able to see the words they choose, and they have to be nouns (a person, place or thing) rather than an adjective (a describing word). We usually go for around five words with each letter, but we tweak this a bit depending on how well used the letter is.

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The final game I’d love to share with you we have called Speed Letters. Here, one of you chooses a letter, and then the other person has to come up with as many words as they can within a minute that begin with that letter. We’ve ended up in fits of giggles playing this game when we get all flustered towards the end desperately trying to come up with more words.

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I hope that these offer nice relaxed ideas you can use for home learning when heading out together for your next walk. 🙂

Feb 27

2

Connecting with nature

By admin | Nature

Britons are missing out on daily doses of connecting with nature. To give an example, new research shows that between 76 – 90% of children say they rarely or never take the time to look up at the moon and the stars, stop to listen to the birds singing, watch the sunrise, or take the time to smell wild flowers.

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While many children and adults are deeply concerned about the future of the natural world, they don’t always connect to it. If people fall in love with nature they’ll be more likely to look after it. Not only this, but having the opportunity to connect with nature also benefits our well-being.

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In light of these findings, it is fantastic that the National Trust has launched a campaign to encourage everyone to notice the beauty of the world around them. This includes a weekly guide to noticing nature. As the National Trust say:

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“Spending time in nature not only boosts our connection to the natural world it also helps our well-being. Whether you spend 20 seconds or 20 minutes in nature, you can easily make it part of your daily routine. From looking up at the trees to walking barefoot in the grass, we’ve got a beautifully illustrated guide full of ideas to get you started.”

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You can read more about this fantastic campaign and download the weekly guide here.

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⭐️

Nov 13

6

The benefits of Kindness

By admin | Kindness

Kindness

There are so many benefits to being kind. Here are just a few…

Researchers have illustrated that kindness may be contagious, and that people are more likely to do kind acts when they see others being kind as well. What a wonderful potential domino effect when a crowd witnesses an act of kindness.

When we witness an act of kindness it may produce a hormone called oxytocin which can aid in lowering blood pressure and improving heart health. Oxytocin can also improve our self-esteem and optimism.

Research shows that being kind can make you happy, particularly when kindness is practised consistently

Studies have shown that people can feel stronger and more energetic after helping others.

Engaging in actions of kindness can produce the brain’s natural painkiller, endorphins.

Kindness helps to reduce the emotional barrier between two people and helps people to be more open and bonded with each other.

People aged 55 and over who volunteer for two or more organisations have an impressive 44% lower likelihood of dying early. This is after sifting out other contributing factors such as physical health, exercise, gender, habits such as smoking, marital status etc. That’s pretty impressive!

No wonder being kind is cool. What kind act will you and your little ones be carrying out today?

Jul 02

3

The benefits of music

By admin | Benefits of music

Benefits of music for children

We know that children can benefit from learning how to play music, but why exactly is this? This blog post explores what some of these benefits are.

Music can increase memory skills as learning how to play an instrument also helps children to learn how to create, store and retrieve memories.

As outlined in the Little Wise Toys’ phonics activity kit, listening skills and developing an awareness of sounds can play an important part in helping to lay the foundations for learning how to read. Listening to and making music is a great way to support this. One suggestion in the phonics kit is to make music by drumming on different items (loudly and softly) and listen to and talk about the different sounds that are made.

Music is also a great way to enhance maths skills. By understanding beat, rhythm and scales, for example, children are also learning how to divide, create fractions and recognise patterns.

When children improve their abilities with a specific instrument and achieve their goals, they can feel very satisfied and this can improve their self-esteem while also learning great concentration skills.

As outlined in the Little Wise Toys’ activity kit that focuses on developing social and emotional intelligence, it is also good to encourage children to engage in age-appropriate challenges that they can rise to. Activities that appropriately stretch children’s abilities (such as learning to play a new musical instrument) can help them to learn how to deal with small amounts of ‘healthy stress’. Through this, they learn a fantastic growth mindset understanding that if they put some effort in, they can gain brand new skills, solve problems and make progress over time. It can also be a great lesson in how to deal with frustrations.

Another fantastic benefit of music is the opportunity it creates for children to express themselves. By learning how to express themselves and their complex feelings through music, they are able to find a way to show or play what they are feeling.

Here’s to music and all the good things that it brings…

Jun 13

3

How can I help my child develop empathy?

By admin | Top tips

empathy, social and emotional intelligence, children's mental health, children's well-being

Empathy Day takes place each year in June and was inspired by research which showed that humans are not born with a fixed amount of empathy and it is a skill that we can nurture and learn. Empathy means being able to imagine how others might feel in a given situation, and responding in a way that takes others’ feelings into account. It is a complex skill for children to learn and takes time to develop over a number of years. As outlined in the Little Wise Box of Emotions, there are many things that we can do to support the development of empathy in children. To name just a few in brief…

We can help children to learn to name and understand their own different emotions and feelings.

We can model empathy as little ones learn so much by how their parents respond to them when they are frightened or upset, and by watching our interactions with others.

We can regularly talk with our children about how they and other people might feel in different day-to-day situations.

We can read stories together which expose children to a wealth of new experiences, and give them the opportunity to practise seeing the world from the perspective of other people.

We can provide opportunities for children to engage in pretend play where they take on the role of different characters so that they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

Small steps in lots of different ways can help to make such a big difference in nurturing the development of social and emotional intelligence in young children.

P.S. I was at my mum’s the other day for my birthday BBQ. I picked the crisp in the image out of the bowl. Just before I was about to pop it into my mouth it made me smile to discover that it was the shape of a heart. I thought it seemed like an appropriate image for a post about empathy ?❤️

May 05

4

Managing Emotions

By admin | Top tips

Managing emotions

This blog looks at an example of how the Little Wise Box of Emotions for 3-6 year olds can help children to learn how to manage their emotions and feelings.

One of the benefits of the Little Wise Box of Emotions is the opportunity it provides for little ones to get really hands on and interactive in their exploration of social and emotional development. Not only does this make the whole process more engaging and fun, it can also empower kids (and parents) to be able to explore situations in more depth than they might otherwise do through talking alone.

As well as exploring social and emotional development more generally, the kit also provides a great opportunity to explore more specific situations. For example, it might be that you’ve noticed a particular event that regularly triggers big emotions in your child, such as worry, anger or frustration. You could start off by looking through the different facial expressions/feelings in the kit and ask/help them to identify which ones are relevant to that particular situation. You could talk about how each of these emotions make your little one feel (not forgetting how these feelings present themselves physically too, such as a knot in the tummy, feeling hot and so on and so forth). For younger children, this could also involve extending their vocabulary and introducing them to new names of different feelings (such an important part of developing children’s social and emotional intelligence). You could then validate their feelings, offer empathy and understanding, and reassure them that no emotions are bad, it is how we react to them that is important. You could then brainstorm together and identity different ways to handle the situation next time. And then of course praise them when you see them implement some of their new techniques.

Often these conversations might need to happen several times before you start to see a difference. But, like sponges, bit by bit children are soaking everything up and are learning so much that they will benefit from for years to come.

Oct 12

5

Supporting Children’s Mental Health

By admin | Top tips

This is a pretty powerful quote and so relevant to children’s mental health and emotional well-being. The wonderful thing is that there are so many things we can do to help give our children the foundations to help them to grow up into strong, confident, resilient and happy adults.

We can help our children to learn the names of different emotions so that they can learn to express themselves through words.
We can talk openly with our children about emotions so that they know they can talk about theirs too, and know that emotions aren’t bad things that need to be suppressed. Instead they can learn that it is how we respond to them that is important.
We can let children know that their feelings are important, even when it seems as though they are getting upset about something that might seem small, as it probably isn’t a small thing to them.
We can teach our children about growth mindset so that they know that traits such as their abilities and intelligence are not fixed, but can grow and develop when we put the effort in and work hard at things.
We can model behaviour by saying ‘sorry’ when we get it wrong, and we can talk with them openly about how we might try and manage our own feelings sometimes (‘I’m sorry I yelled at you. Next time I’m going to stop, take some deep breaths, and calm down before I speak’).
We can help children to understand that how they think about something can affect how they feel, and subsequently how they react to a situation, and how ‘helpful’ thoughts can lead to more positive feelings and responses.
We can communicate positive messages to our children regularly (e.g. ‘I’m so glad you came into the world’) which can do so much to help children feel loved and secure.
We can lean down to our children, or pick them up, so that they can hug our hearts, and not our knees.

I could go on, and indeed I did in the form of the Little Wise Box of Emotions for 3-6 year olds, the Reframing Your Thoughts toolkit for 6-12 year olds and the Reframing Your Thoughts toolkit for teenagers.

Wishing you all a happy Mental Health Awareness Week ❤️

Jul 26

2

Colour recognition

By admin | Top tips

Colour recognition is an essential building block in a young child’s development and will provide a range of life-long learning skills. Here’s a fun early years activity I’ve created to help little ones learn about their colours…

Firstly, you can develop a colour chart together. For this, you’ll need a range of different coloured pens or pencils and a piece of paper. The piece of paper needs two columns. The column on the left-hand side should be titled – ‘Colour’. On the left hand-side column you can then draw rows of different shapes in different colours, and colour them in together. Next to this, you can write the name of the colour. The right-hand column should be titled ‘Number’.

When you next go out and about, bring this piece of paper and a pen out with you. Keep your eyes peeled and see how many things you can spot together of each colour, and mark numbers on the colour chart in the ‘Number’ column. When choosing your colours for the colour chart, you could also use the same colour in different shades (e.g. a dark blue and a light blue) to further enhance children’s understanding of colour. The reason I wanted to draw the colours with shapes is so that we can also throw a bit of learning about shapes into the activity as well.

Little Wise Junior is seven now, and so has a great understanding of colours. Nevertheless, when I asked her to draw an example of the colour chart I describe above for this post, she became completely engaged in the exercise and really wanted us to bring it out with us on our trip out in the afternoon so that she can have a go as well. It just goes to show that one is never to old to have fun exploring colours.. Here’s to lots of fun learning through play