If your children own emergency services dressing up clothes, encourage them to put these on and act out different roles. Add resources from around the house to extend their ideas, learning and play. Act out scenes, get them involved in pretending to put out fires, put the baddies in jail or supply them with pretend medicine/bandages to make family members feel better.

Using resources around the house, paper plates if you have them (if not use paper and cut out circles) create emotion monster faces. Provide your children with coloured pens, pencils, child friendly scissors, glue, and any other resources you may have available. Talk about different emotions with your children, find pictures online to support their understanding of different facial expressions. Encourage your children to produce different emotion monsters, some being happy, sad, grumpy, sleepy etc.

Get a large bucket/tub, fill it with warm water and lots of soapy bubbles! Get the children to wash their toys in the water. Talk to them about textures and encourage the use of their senses. Discuss with the children the importance of staying clean, you could even pretend to give the toys showers or baths and compare your children’s bath time to their toys.

With the children’s support, cut up some cardboard in the shape of a shield. Using home resources, let the children decorate their shields before role playing in a pretend battle. Encourage messy play, talk to your children about the colours and textures of the resources they are using.

The brilliant Axel Scheffler has produced a book about Covid-19 Coronavirus just for children - and it's available as a FREE download. Please share so it's available to every family who needs it. https://nosycrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Coronavirus_INS.pdf The Gruffalo illustrator worked with consultant Professor Graham Medley, two head teachers and a psychologist to make sure the book got the messages right, answering questions about quarantine, how you can catch the virus and what happens if you get ill. Publishers Nosy Crow have asked for donations in lieu of payment, to go to our fantastic health workers: www.nhscharitiestogether.co.uk/ This is great for our little ones and to keep as a keepsake to remember how we came together ❤

Create an Easter egg hunt in the garden or around the house. Hide eggs for the children, create small clues for them to follow. Introduce prepositional language such as ‘behind, in front of, next to, on top of’ to support their understanding and learning. Give the children clues, letting them know when they are close to finding an egg. Make the egg hunt as fun as possible, for older children, create some barriers, put an egg up high and encourage their problem solving to retrieve it.

Why not try making these fun pasta Easter eggs! You can make any design on your Easter eggs! You can even decorate other Easter shapes. To make different shapes, grab some Easter cookie cutters and trace around them to make shapes like flowers or a bunny. You will need: cardboard pasta glue paint