How can you reinforce learning at home?
(After school, weekends, and during breaks.)
Reading
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Writing
- Write emails to me! I will write back!
- Encourage your child to keep a journal of special events or daily activities.
- Have your child write or tell stories, then illustrate them. Help them write the story.
- If you have a computer, have your child practice typing by writing stories, notes, letters to people, requests, movie reviews, anything!
- Help your child write letters and postcards to relatives, friends, or even me. Hopefully they will write back. I will!
- Practice writing letters or words in a sugar writing tray.
Math
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- Draw with: pencils, colored pencils, charcoal, sidewalk chalk, markers, or crayons.
- Paint with: watercolor paints, tempera paints, acrylic paints, corn syrup mixed with food coloring, even water on the sidewalk. (Remember a paint shirt! Tempera and acrylic paints and food colorings stain!)
- Make exploding paint bags.
- Paint on wet glue.
- Make bubble wrap stomp paintings.
- Make rainbow bubble snakes.
- Print your own T-shirts. (Inexpensive way to do it!)
- Make bracelets and necklaces with string or yarn and beads or macaroni.
- Use watercolor crayons to draw your own temporary tattoos.
- Create sculptures with found objects such as sticks, leaves, rocks, etc. from a nature hike or your backyard. Help your child with a hot glue gun!
- Make a fairy house in the garden by putting sticks in the ground in a circle or square and place leaves on top. Maybe an acorn cap can be a bowl and some moss can be a rug! Be creative! (Remember that your child's creative experiences are more important than a perfect flowerbed!)
- Make Peanut Pals
Science
- Experiment with water marbles.
- Make alien bubbles.
- Extract DNA from strawberries.
- Make balloon rockets.
- Microwave a bar of soap to make soap clouds.
- Make bouncing bubbles.
- Visit Petco or PetSmart and ask an employee about one or more of the animals there.
- Build a marshmallow sculpture with toothpicks or uncooked spaghetti. Challenge your child to make a tower of at least 2 feet tall or a bridge that will hold a certain number of paperclips.
- Make a layered drink. Find 2 or more different colors of drinks and pour them into the glass, starting with the one that contains the most sugar. The drinks with the most sugar will be the most dense, while the drinks with the least sugar will be less dense and will stay on the top.