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The Three Rs – some ideas for younger children
Reading follow-up
Choose a short story or a fact book, read it first and make up a quick quiz. Younger children might enjoy just five or six questions based on the pictures, while older ones might respond well to recalling information from words and pictures. This takes only a few minutes to do but it can be an enjoyable way to promote closer reading.
Ideas for writing
Collect interesting pictures from newspapers and magazines. Google Images (with Safe Search enabled) is also a useful source of pictures of all kinds. Children can have fun cutting the pictures out and sticking them on to a piece of file paper, leaving some space under each picture. If your child would like to use the computer instead, you could import pictures from the internet into Word or a similar program.
Talk about the picture and encourage your child to write something about it. Younger children might like to write some words suggested by the picture. Older ones might like to write a few sentences describing what they see, or a picture might inspire a story. Some children love to fill in the blanks if you write a few sentences underneath with some key words missing.
Mental arithmetic
You will need some small blank cards: some maths catalogues have blank playing cards which are ideal for this activity. With broad felt-tip pens, write a mental maths calculation on each one. These can be anything from adding and taking away the numbers up to ten for younger ones, to all the times tables and the corresponding division calculations for older ones. Add more cards as the children’s capabilities grow.
There are lots of ways of dealing and choosing the cards, the simplest being to choose one and lay it on the table for the child to work out. Limiting it to a set number of turns each time keeps the game fresh. You can play ‘snap’ or ‘pairs’ and you can make up your own games too.