How to Support Your Child’s Learning at Home

Parents are children’s first educators, and there is strong evidence that the time we spend on our children’s development at home can have long-lasting effects as children progress into formal education.

With parents busier than ever, it can be a challenge to find quality time to spend supporting your child’s development; however, a difference can be made with just a small amount of time daily.

Reading

Reading to children from birth creates the foundation to ignite a desire to read for pleasure as they grow. Significant evidence shows that reading to your child every day can support their language development and wider understanding of the world around them.

Taking 5-10 minutes a day to read to your child will have an impact, and doing this as a relaxing activity before bedtime is often a great way to end your child’s day.

Outdoor Play

As part of our Tommies Guarantee, children will access our outdoor environments daily, regardless of the weather conditions. This is because we know the importance of outdoor play on children’s development. Children will often be happy to go outside, irrespective of the weather. However, it is often the adults around them that create the barriers to accessing the outdoors.

For many children, particularly boys, their engagement levels in activities increase when outside, so denying them the opportunity to go out every day can significantly impact how well they engage with activities. So, get those coats on and get outside!

Singing and Music Time

Supporting children with nursery rhymes and simple songs is an excellent way of supporting children’s engagement in learning. While supporting language development, it’s also a fantastic opportunity for children to get physical as they showcase the actions that accompany the songs.

Imaginative Play

For children under 5, learning through imaginative play is a massive part of their development. Most young children will enjoy play they can relate to, i.e. domestic role play. This is because they feel comfortable taking on the roles in these types of play. Imaginative play creates a fantastic foundation for language development and supports children’s understanding of Maths, Literacy and Personal, Social and Emotional Development.

Routine

Whilst routines are not explicitly related to children’s development, they are fundamental to providing children with the foundations for learning.

Young children crave routine; they like to know what is happening now and what’s coming next, so supporting children with a regular routine with no surprises can positively impact their development.

Routines include sleep expectations, regular bedtimes and nap times to ensure your child feels well-rested enough to absorb information from the world around them. Tiredness, as we know, can hugely impact how our children feel and how well-equipped we feel as parents to support our child’s development.

Managing Your Expectations

Lastly, ensuring that our expectations for our children support their own individual development is vital. Children thrive on getting things right and being praised for a job well done, so we mustn’t set them up to fail with our unrealistic expectations of them.

Where children are developmentally unable to do what you’re asking, this can cause them to feel embarrassed and could cause a regression in their development as they refrain from attempting things moving forward.