SPELLINGS  

• Take the week's spellings, jumble up the letters of each of them, turning them into anagrams and see if your child can solve them. They can give you some anagrams of your own by copying from a dictionary or any nearby book and finding the longest words! - KS1/KS2

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• Act out spellings! Your child has to try and work out which spelling word you mean and write it correctly on a whiteboard or on paper. You could take turns with this, it always seems to help if they think you're having to some practising too. - KS1/KS2

  • Recently I did this with words that end in '-er', which are fun to act out as this includes many jobs - teacher, firefighter, cleaner, police officer, dancer, painter, gardener, etc. (Not doctor!) Also '-er' and 'est' as found in words like cold, colder, coldest, which are great as the more extreme the word is, the more extreme the acting can be!

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CAPACITY/VOLUME

• Create Wizard Potions! Together, collect many different-sized containers in the most unusual shapes you can find. (Something to bear in mind - you'll need to be able to see liquid inside them.) Fill them all up with the same amount of liquid and discuss how although some may look more or less full than the others, there can still be the same amount of liquid inside. Continue by deciding on the names of different potions your child would like to create and then putting in the correct amounts that 'the wizard told you' would need to go into each potion. Add food colouring (or in my case, balsamic vinegar as it was the only thing I had in and was more visible over Skype,) to see the liquids more clearly or differentiate between them.  - KS1. To take this further:

  • Compare different sizes and use keywords such as smallest/least, largest/most. Practise halving/doubling.

  • Spot which ones are less than half full, more than half full or exactly half full. Estimate how much is in a container before measuring it. Use the liquids to practise adding/subtracting. The wizard may later need your child to help you measure ingredients out for dinner (if you want to slow down the dinner-making process!) - KS1 and lower KS2

  • You can increase the specificity of measurements for older age groups and include converting measurements into different units for further difficulty (as of course the wizard prefers litres to millilitres and unfortunately your measuring jug is in millilitres.) With siblings - most precise measurement wins!​ - Upper KS2

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POSITION/DIRECTION

• Draw a treasure map! (This is obviously a brilliantly time-consuming, creativity-expressing activity in itself if you need it to be.) You can specify particular things it must include if you want to take this further - a skyscraper, a grove of trees, a very big hill, a funfair, a secret cave. When that's completed, get a very small figurine that, importantly, has a face on it. (Indicating clearly which way the figure is facing when it gets moved about.) - KS1. There are many variations on where to take this:

  • Ask how the figurine gets from one landmark on the map to another and the child has to explain the route taken back to you using phrases like 'they walk forward two steps, do a half turn anti-clock wise, turn right, walk forward three steps, do a quarter turn clockwise, etc' Try and encourage any right or left turns to happen on the spot, not moving forward at the same time, as this helps keep things consistent.

  • Ask them to write down these instructions and explain that there is a party being hosted at one of the landmarks, so clear and detailed directions need to go out with the invitations.

  • Maybe there are different figurines starting in different places and they each need to get to each other's houses for a cup of tea and don't want to get lost.

  • If you or your child's sibling also draws a map, they can take turns, giving each other instructions to different places or pick a spot where the 'treasure' is hiding and direct the other person to it.

  • Add a grid and coordinates to the paper and then have your child draw the map over the top of this, for further difficulty. (Year 2 and up.)

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DIRECTIONAL/PREPOSITIONAL WORDS AND PHRASES

• Draw typical Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter scenes one by one, without letting the other person see your drawing. (Discussing the order of the seasons and what they entail is key practise for Year 1. You could also do this for each month of the year.) 

  • Then practise prepositions and directional language by describing the scene you have drawn to each other using phrases like, 'The bucket is next to the spade', 'The sand is to the right of the sea', 'There is a seagull just below the sun', 'The beach ball is under the deckchair'. You then each have to try and draw the other person's scene, based on their instructions. - KS1

  • Other versions of this would be to both write down these sets of instructions first before handing them over and then trying to recreate the scene from these written instructions. The more in depth you make them, the older the children you could use this activity for. It is perfect for helping older children practise detailed, descriptive language including similes and metaphors! - KS2

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• Describe your home! Ask your child to describe the positions of items in your home, related to one another, eg: The lamp is beside to the bed. - KS1

  • This could evolve into a game of - 'which room in the house am I describing?'

  • Or, hide an object in one room and describe where it is for the child to find. Eg: It is in a room that is to the left of the bathroom, it is to the right of the blue table, it is under the placemat. Your child can also write down instructions in this manner, for you to use and find an item!

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MEASUREMENT

• Put on your scientist goggles (any pair of sunglasses/glasses you can find) and make measurement reports! Get out any or all of the following - tape measure, ruler, set of scales, measuring jug. Write a list of questions to answer using measurement around the house (that you can answer using the measuring tool you've selected.) The questions can be as weird as you like.

  • Example questions: How tall is the toilet? Which is the heaviest potato and how heavy is it? How long is the line I can make by putting all the shampoo bottles end to end? How far is it from the kettle to the toaster? How much water can I fit into the biggest mug in the kitchen? - KS1/KS2

  • If you and your child make different lists, you can extend the activity by double checking each others' work and marking for accuracy. Encourage accurate use of units for older children and again you can increase difficulty by converting measurements too, eg: from g to kg, for upper KS2.

  • To make this activity last even longer, add labelled diagrams to your 'measurement report' or use it to estimate the height/weight/capacity of fictional things. Eg: The amount of liquid in a bottle of veritaserum from Harry Potter, the height of a unicorn , the weight of Bumblebee from Transformers. Try and keep the estimates realistic even if the items aren't!

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METAPHORS

• Together, imagine a robot that unfortunately does not have the capacity to feel emotion. Perhaps you can draw this robot. Now try and think about how you would explain to the robot what different emotions feel like. Remember, the robot has never experienced emotion and so can't relate one emotion to another - eg: 'Anger feels like being really cross and full of rage' - this won't work as the robot doesn't understand what any of these feelings are. But, the robot has experienced other things in the world and we can use these as metaphors to describe the emotions. - KS2/KS3

  • Metaphors should be in the following form - 'Something IS something else' or 'Something WAS something else'. Eg: Anger is a bright flame in my heart. Sadness was a rainy day.

  • Avoid using 'like' or 'as' or they will become similes - which are great in themselves, but often metaphors are trickier and therefore good to practise. Eg: Joy is like a big firework/ Joy feels as big as a firework = similes.

  • Extend the metaphor further by including some extra information, eg: Anger is a bright flame in my heart, burning recklessly and spraying sparks at anyone close by. Sadness was a rainy day in my mind.

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POETRY

• Pick up an ordinary object - the more ordinary the better, as it's more of a challenge. Together, look at it for 5 minutes, really thinking about it, what it reminds you of, how it makes you feel, what it might think about if it was alive, how it was created, what it does during the day, why it exists?! Write down all the words and phrases it makes you feel/that come to mind. After you've written down everything you can think of, put them together in a way that makes sense to you and your child, individually. There is no wrong way to do this. Encourage the addition of extra thoughts/phrases as they put it together. Think about the layout on the page how many words you'd like on a line as you write it, whether or not it will rhyme, (it doesn't have to!) You will have composed a brilliant poem! - KS1/KS2/KS3

  • Include a timer when note-taking for children may not want to write very much - they have to keep writing anything that comes to mind until the timer stops, they can't put that pencil down! A timer is also helpful for those children who could just go on writing forever. You could do lots of very short and sweet poems (I definitely think aim to complete a poem rather than spend too long on the note-taking,) or a longer, more detailed poem.

  • Include techniques like onomatopoeia, alliteration, personification, metaphors and similes for a longer activity or for older children. - Upper KS2/KS3

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WORD CLASSES - ADJECTIVES AND VERBS

• Draw simple, small pictures of your whole bodies in the middle of a big piece of paper, leaving lots of space around it. Add annotations, where each annotation has to mention all the adjectives you can think of that describe that body part, and all the verbs (doing words) it is used for. Eg: Short, strong legs - used to run, to walk, to sprint, to dash, to saunter, etc. Bendy, brown fingers - used to point, to type, to grab. Fill up the white space with as many words as you can think of! Try and keep the verbs in the ‘to’ format to keep things consistent. - KS1/KS2/KS3

  • You can then move from drawing human bodies to different animals and annotating similarly.

  • It could even morph into an activity on simple past and present tenses. Simple past =  I walked, she walked, you walked. Simple present = I walk, she walks, you walk. If you add an ‘-ing’, ie: I was walking, I am walking, you are no longer in the simple past and present tense, you are in a progressive/ continuous tense. So it might be good to stick to simple. But progressive/continuous tenses are taught from Year 2 if you do want to give it a go.

  • This can definitely be taken all the way up to a lower KS3 level and used as a word bank for unusual and more challenging synonyms for adjectives and verbs. It would also be a useful reference to have when writing stories/ poetry. - KS3

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OTHER USEFUL THINGS TO DO / HAVE AROUND THE HOUSE:

• Strips of paper. A pile of strips of paper goes such a long way. Some example ideas:

  • Practise spellings one one side and draw a picture of the spelling on the reverse - you can try and guess the spelling your child wrote from the picture only. Bonus points for two spellings involved in one picture - Eg: for the 'ai' sound we recently had a 'snail' in the 'rain'.

  • Together, write prepositional phrases on different strips of paper, phrases like 'under the bed', 'beside the unicorn', 'above the robot', 'with a potato', 'next to the moon'. Your child can then pick one out at random and add it to a sentence along with a spelling word, eg: The government is next to the moon - then they have to try and draw this scene on the back of the strip. 

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• Have a 'cool words' jar. Any time you read or hear a interesting sounding or new word, check the spelling and write it on a strip of paper and add it to the jar as an everyday way of expanding vocabulary and practising spelling sounds.

  • If you're feeling adventurous, have strips for each word class - adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns - and these could be colour coded. Fill in as many as you can and then your child can use them when working on any composition to add some variation into their writing.​​

  • You can also pick out a challenging noun and adjective without looking and compose short, 5 minute stories with them as the title. You can use the format The [adjective] [noun]. Eg: The Endless Conversation. The Agitated Invention. The Invisible Thought.

  • Use this tip to help - if you can put 'a/an' or 'the' in front of it, it's a noun. If you can put it directly in front of a noun and it sounds like it could describe it (even if it if a very strange description,) it's an adjective.

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• Number and symbol flashcards. Useful up to even early KS3. For KS1, include a range of numbers up to 100 and the basic symbols, add, subtract, multiply, divide, equals. Also more than and less than signs. For KS2 include a little number 2 and a little 3 to represent squared and cubed numbers, and a square root sign . For Year 6, add in letters like 'a' and 'b' to represent algebra. For KS3, add in brackets and a cube root sign.

  • Use these to make each other sums that make sense and solve them. With KS3, this can be great practise for understanding how to lay out a sum that makes sense and recapping BODMAS or BIDMAS - The order in which you should solve different parts of the sum. But as with every age group, just using it to practise arithmetic or mental maths is beneficial. For younger children, even Year 1, this helps with understanding concepts like the fact that when subtracting, the bigger number comes first, or it doesn't really work out. (Avoid negative numbers until KS2.)

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• Mad libs. If you're not already doing these, you need to start! Such a fun way to practise grammar. It is a paper game you can buy (or put together yourself if you feel creative, but this can be quite time-consuming,) where you ask for certain kinds of words - adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, the child shouts them out, then you use them to complete a story (which the child doesn't hear until the end,) with hopefully hilarious results.

  • Eg: The [adjective] woman [verb (past tense)] [adverb] down the road to buy [number] [adjective] [noun (more than one)]. 

  • This becomes: The [excited] woman [hula-hooped] [gracefully] down the road to buy [four million] [shiny] [potatoes].

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• I call this tutor time! If your child is losing momentum with revising/going over certain topics - they are the tutor now! Task them with putting together the coolest Powerpoint to explain everything to you - if they can explain it from start to finish in a way that someone else understands - they understand it too.​

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Please drop me an email / give me a ring for more information or to talk about sessions.

ellarosiebg@gmail.com - 07843 431 567

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