Help your child get the most from their play
Here are some ideas to use with children of different ages.

Ideas for the under-twos

• Talk to your baby – make eye contact, talk to the baby and then pause to give him or her time to respond. If you exaggerate the movements of your lips, face and eyebrows this will make the conversation easier to follow and will often be copied by your baby. Try letting your baby lead the conversation while you respond to his or her eye movements and facial expressions. Taking part in conversations from an early age lays the foundations for later language development.

• Most toddlers enjoy stacking things, slotting them in holes and carrying things from place to place. Put together a small collection of tins, boxes, wooden blocks, purses, small bags, wooden clothes pegs, bangles, large wooden curtain rings and a wooden mug tree for them to explore and investigate. Finding out ‘what things do’ encourages young children to be curious and to solve problems for themselves.

Ideas for two- to three-year-olds

• When unpacking the shopping let your child play ‘shops’ with the tins and packets before you put them away. Help your child to ‘read’ the information on the tins and packets that says what is inside. This helps children to become aware that words and symbols have a meaning.

• Make some props to go with the action rhymes: ‘Two little dickie birds’, ‘Five little ducks’, ‘Five currant buns’ , ‘Five fat sausages sizzling in the pan’. Use two paper birds attached to your fingers, five plastic ducks, cardboard sausages or pictures cut out of magazines and currant buns made out of playdough. These are all amusing ways of introducing numbers and counting.

• When out for a walk, or playing in the garden or the park, trying moving in different ways. Say, ‘Let’s pretend we are soldiers’, ‘Let’s pretend we are dinosaurs’, ‘Let’s pretend we are frogs’. These games develop children’s coordination skills and encourage them to be imaginative.

Ideas for four- and five-year-olds

• Cut some characters out of comics or birthday cards and glue them on to lolly sticks or pieces of strong card to make some stick puppets. Have fun telling stories with the stick puppets. Try using the stick puppets, or your hand, to make shadow puppets. Acting out stories develops children’s language and imagination and helps them to understand the structure of a story.

• At the end of the year give your child old diaries or calendars to play with. Leaflets and forms which you receive as junk mail also make excellent starting points for role play. Children can develop their mark-making and early writing skills as they develop elaborate games using these ‘props’.

• Have fun playing with a torch. You can use a torch indoors or out of doors when it is getting dark. If you are playing indoors you can make a dark den by placing a thick cloth or blanket over a table – try adding some shiny things to the den. This encourages children to be curious and to find things out for themselves as well as to explore their feelings about being in the dark.