Cognitive Development
Laundry Time
Infants enjoy helping their families with daily tasks. Identify an item and ask your infant to place it in the washer. If possible, ask your infant what the item is.
Encourage your infant to help you fold facecloths, small towels and other easy items. Match similar items together and narrate your actions. “These socks are the same.” “We have three shirts”
Physical Literacy
Infant Weightlifting
Fill different size recycled plastic bottles with different levels of water and food colouring or other shiny items. Infants enjoy transporting items and will use their core and balance to lift the bottles from one place to another. Make sure they are not too heavy for your baby.
Social-Emotional Development
Head and Shoulders
Sing and model the actions to the song “Head and Shoulders”. Sing the song at a pace that your infant can follow along with their actions. Encourage your child to point to their body parts as you sing the song.
Do you need help with the song? You can find it on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA48wTGbU7A
Language Development
Munch, Crunch, Gurgle
During mealtimes, point out the sounds that foods make when we chew. Crackers and dry cereals crunch and crack. Milk gurgles when we swallow. Apples are crispy, soup is slurpy. New words stimulate your child’s brain and add to their vocabulary.
Creative Activity
Colour Diffusion
Mix a variety of water and food colouring into small cups or a muffin tin. Provide a coffee filter or paper towel as the canvas. Using a medicine dropper, encourage your child to squeeze the dropper to release the coloured water. Watch as the coffee filter absorbs the water and different colours appear and mix. Describe your observations. “Wow, the yellow and blue drops turned into green.”
Additional Resources
Visit NASA’s website to view a collection of stories, games, videos and at-home activities for children in grades K-12.
https://www.nasa.gov/stem/forstudents/k-4/index.html
Kate Messner.com: A collection of favourite authors and illustrators share resources that include video read-alouds, drawing and writing lessons