Our teachers and educators have shared five fun and educational activities that families can try at home with their children this holiday season. 

Learning extends beyond the classroom, and the holiday season is the perfect time for children to play and learn while they explore their natural curiosities. If you’re looking for ideas on how to keep your children entertained and engaged, here are some experiences you can try. 

Nature bracelet 

Using any kind of tape, create a bracelet around your child’s wrist so that the sticky surface is facing outwards. Take your child on a nature walk in your community to collect natural treasures that stick onto the bracelet. By the end of your walk, your child should have a full bracelet collection of flowers, leaves, bark etc. 

Learning outcomes: Encourage your child’s communication skills by asking questions about their discoveries, such as “What do you notice about your treasures?” and “What is different or the same?” To support their learning, ask them to compare their treasures, like “How many can you fit on your bracelet?” and “Which is the biggest or smallest?” This experience will help develop community awareness by reflecting on ethical collecting practices, such as whether it’s okay to pick flowers and leaves or if it’s better to choose only those that have fallen. Discuss who else the flowers and leaves may be important to. 

Map for Santa 

For families celebrating Christmas, support your child in designing a map for Santa to know how to reach your house. You can start this off by walking with your child to a local landmark (this could be your street sign, Aus Post, or another easily identifiable location). Support your child to take note of everything you pass on the way back to your house, you might use your phone to take photos of things to remember. Have a look for your house/building number, and other identifiable features of your home. Once you return home, set your child up with some drawing materials and scaffold them to remember the directions. Use the photos taken on your phone as a guide for drawing. Once the map is complete, put it in an envelope addressed to Santa and send it off in the mail! 

Learning outcomes: Encourage your child’s learning by engaging them with positional language (e.g., front, behind, left, right) and counting steps between landmarks to develop their spatial awareness. Support their fine motor skills and mark-making abilities by guiding them in tasks such as deciding where to draw windows on a building. Use the experience to foster empathy and awareness of the broader community, prompting your child to think about families who may celebrate differently or face challenges, as well as Christmas traditions around the world. Exploring maps, both local and global, can also spark imagination about Santa’s journey on Christmas Eve. 

We’re going on a letter hunt! 

Choose a letter, or a series of letters (the letter at the start of your child’s name is a good place to start!) and head off on a walk around your neighborhood ready to spot all the different places that your letter appears. You could include a quick hand drawn card with the letters on it and mark off the letters each time you see them- a great fine motor addition as children use fine motor skills to cross off each letter. Make it fun with a pair of binoculars or a magnifying glass.   
 
Learning outcomes: This experience helps children build their understanding that letters (and symbols) have meanings and are found all around us. Walking together and spotting letters and numbers encourages children to pay close attention to the print in our environments, and to their meanings. Exploring the different places that letters appear, and even exploring letter sounds with your child is building their early literacy skills as they start to put together single letters or letter groups, with their associated sound/s.  Creating times of joint attention (where you and your child are focused on the same item or concept) builds on social communication skills and strengthens relationships.  

Experimenting with colour 

This water-based play activity is a fun and engaging way to keep children cool on a hot day while promoting exploration and learning. You’ll need: 

If you have eye droppers at home, they can be used as well to encourage fine motor development. For younger children, set up a large tub with water and containers of different sizes for filling and pouring. You can add jugs with different coloured water, encouraging them to mix and explore colour combinations. For slightly older children, offer jugs with 2-3 colours and smaller containers for mixing. Using droppers or small pours from jugs, children can experiment with creating new shades and colours, sparking curiosity and learning about cause and effect.  

Learning outcomes: This water-based play experience promotes mathematical thinking and language development through exploring concepts of volume, capacity (more than, less than), height, width, fast, slow, how much. It also supports the development of scientific concepts of change if you use colour and gravity. Hand-eye coordination through actions like pouring, scooping, and splashing and practiced. 

Scavenger hunt at home 

For this scavenger hunt, write and/or draw a list of items that you have around the house. For example: 

Your child can use a basket to collect the treasures, or they could place them inside a circle on the floor (you could use a hoola hoop). 

Drawing the instructions is a useful tool to support communication. For example, you could draw an eye for ‘can you find’, draw the number 3, and draw a blue square so your child knows to look for 3 blue items that are square shaped. Support them to read the symbols and icons you draw. Encourage your child to tick off items from the list as they find them to encourage focus and a sense of achievement. Count down as you go and then the total number of items found. 

Learning outcomes: A scavenger hunt supports thinking using visual, written and verbal supports to collect items. It is an enjoyable way of working on executive functioning such as sequencing, organising and reinforcing problem-solving skills. Scavenger hunting gets your child moving.