How to involve your children while working from home?

A silver lining during these otherwise unprecedented times is that while working from home, parents get to spend a lot of time with their family and kids. This can be used as an opportunity to spend quality time with your kids. With a little bit of structuring and planning, this can turn from a chaotic to delightful learning time for the child. At Gulmohar Early years have come up with some ideas to help the parents out there.

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Watch the great Epics of Ramayana, Mahabharata with them:

That's right, when else will you get the opportunity to watch these epic tales of our culture from the bygone era. Most of the parents today, being late 80s, 90s kids know and must have watched these delightful epics at some time in their childhood. It's now your child's turns know about depths of these great epics. Even if they don't understand it, it's fine let them relate to whatever level they can understand. Tips:

• Watch the series with them, talk to them about the characters and their traits. If they pick up a favorite character they might want to be like that.

• If you have a book relating to these epics get it along, this will inspire the kids to read and get inspiration. If you don't have it, no problem, get a book with the scriptures from our puja room and let them have a feel. Now they will appreciate them even more.

Here's a board illustrated by Alicia Souza

2. It's time to READ with them -

We all know the immense benefits of reading, there's saying all leaders are great readers. This has weight because reading opens your mind to grasp knowledge and helps one become an effective communicator. Both being, essential for a leader. Some Tips:

• Kids usually don't read on their own, they have to be read to. So, setup a time, maybe before they go to bed and sit with them with a book which is age-appropriate.

• Read them aloud, ask questions and give answers. This will ignite curiosity in them to read further the book which they might have otherwise found uninteresting.
  

3. LOOSE PARTS PLAY -

This form of play, helps children play and create something with objects easily available around them. This is believed to ignite and nurture the creativity and resourcefulness of the child.

Some Tips:

• Some of the materials you can use for loose parts are: Cardboards, newspapers, flowers, leaves, sticks, pebbles, milk cans, wooden blocks, etc. Some activities that can be done:

• Painting the stones, Setting up a small garden area.

• Block play with the milk cans, wooden blocks

• Build an obstacle course for them to move and play around. Check out here a video from a school in India on how they created one, which also helped with numbers and color concepts.

4. CLEAN up & Hygiene:

There couldn't have been a better time for this. As we are facing a global pandemic and realizing how health always trumps other things in life. This is a good chance to teach your kids about the importance of CLEAN UP after their work and how to practice good hygiene.

Some Tips:

• Play a game with them for cleanup: Children learn through games, how about ask where are the red colour paints, I want to put them away.

• Sing a rhyme with them or play music. Children learn much more through music and rhymes than they do with strict direct instructions.

STAY SAFE and make this an opportunity to spend time and let children learn.

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