Practical learning activities at home

Practical learning activities are a great way to learn at home whilst having fun. When combined with more structured, formal learning activities, it can create a perfect balance for your home learning routine. Here are some of our favourite practical learning experiences which can be completed around your home.

Family Quiz

Many of us will have seen the popular TV shows in which adults are challenged to answer questions which their much younger children have learnt at school. The simple idea of encouraging your child to create a family quiz to test everyone else has so many benefits.

Firstly, they will be revising any topics they have learnt lately. Secondly, the act of writing the quiz down is an home learning routine that they are highly likely to enjoy. Thirdly, the sense of achievement they will feel as they watch their parents struggle to remember what a ‘reflexive pronoun’ is will give them a big boost in confidence! Why not use video calling to run the quiz with extended family and friends?

Escape Room

The popularity of escape rooms has exploded in recent years. But why not bring the escape room concept into your own home? In this activity, children are encouraged to come up with a series of challenges and clues which need solving in a particular order, much like a treasure hunt. The planning of the escape room really stretches children’s logic and problem-solving skills, and of course, they need to write the instructions down for others to follow.

Baking

There have been some excellent ‘baking by fractions’ activities appearing in the last few weeks which help students learn new methods. However, you don’t necessarily need to follow a specially made recipe to bring maths into the kitchen. Baking recipes inherently include some great opportunities for maths learning whilst improving a practical skill.

At lower levels, you can focus on measuring ingredients and even cutting the end product into fractions. For higher levels, you can ask your child to scale-up a recipe by a given factor or ask them to convert the amounts of ingredients into a fraction of the total weight.

Board Game

This is another simple idea that can be adapted to lots of different subjects and abilities. Either print off or draw a blank board game template and create a board game based on things they have learnt recently. This is a great activity to do with younger children practising their reading and writing, as they can write down words on the squares as they create the game, and then sound them out correctly as they play it.

Blindfolded Directions

In this activity, one person is blindfolded whilst another person must guide them towards another place in your home using verbal directions. Again, you can make this more complex depending on the level of your child. For lower levels, you can just use directions such as clockwise turns and steps forward. For higher levels, you can decide on compass points and direct each other using more complex instructions such as, “Walk about 2 metres north-east”.

Find more home learning activities in our blog.