Home learning

• At The Early Bird Pre-School CIC we believe in working together with families to ensure that all children are supported in their learning and development.  To help this, we provide some exciting home learning opportunities for our families. We find these home learning activities are really beneficial to both the children and their family, it supports their social interactions and helps build relationships. We have great feedback from parents, the children always have so much joy when completing these tasks and show how proud they are when they bring them into the setting to share with us. We love to display all the activities completed in the setting as it builds children’s confidence and self-esteem.  It also provides a prompt for the children to remember and recall what they did, an important skill for children to develop.  The aim is that all these activities are free and fun. 

With our older children we provide the same home learning opportunities but we like to provide a challenge alongside these, for example; if they have an Autumn treasure bag to find different objects in the environment, we will challenge them to find something smooth or spikey.

Some examples of our home learning ideas:

• Family mobiles

• Making playdough

• Autumn treasure bags

• Helping hands

• Sharing their favourite books

• Collage making

Playdough recipe

• 2 cups of plain flour

• 1 cup of salt

• 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar

• 1 tablespoon of oil

• 1 cup of water

• Your chosen colour, scent & texture

Method: add all dry ingredients into a bowl then add wet ingredients, mix together well.

Shortbread recipe

• 125g of butter

• 55g caster sugar

• 180gs of plain flour

Method:

1. Step 1- heat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas 5

2. Step 2- Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth

3. Step 3- Stir in the flour to get a smooth paste. Place dough on work surface and roll out and cut out your shapes

4. Step 5- Bake for 15-20 minutes

Salt Dough recipe

• 2 cups of plain flour

• 1 cup of salt

• Up to 1 cup of water

• Add food colouring if required or paint when dry

Method: mix all the dry ingredients together, slowly add the water, then knead the dough together and get creating.