Ayl, an English teacher from Cape Town, South Africa, has given us an insight into one of the simple, fun and educational games that her family have been playing at home.
What did you do?
We played a colour-matching and sorting game, out of recycling.
What you need:
- A plastic bowl or small bucket, in each colour of the rainbow. Also black white, clear and sparkly.
- Recycling, cut up into the same number of different colours, about 10 of each. I made the pieces square-ish, and about 2cm x 2cm.
Instructions:
- Put all the pieces of paper/card/plastic, cut up, all colours mixed, in a pile, or a large bowl.
- The child needs to take one and put it in the container of the same colour.
If you have more than 1 child, they can take it in turns.
This game is most suitable for children under 3 or 4. Older children can help with the preparation of the game, finding the right colours in the recycling, cutting or tearing them out and gathering up the containers.
Tell us all a bit about yourself…
My name is Ayl, and I am an English teacher in Cape Town. I teach English to foreigners, but of course they have all gone home. Our language school has gone online, but there are a lot of teachers and not that many students, so I only teach about 2 hours a day.
The rest of the time I am enjoying homeschooling and hanging out with my 2 littles, Ashley (nearly 6) and Ember (2.5).
My husband James is a plumber, so he is still working, but he is also around a lot, so we pay a lot with the kids, build tracks and toys and build forts and suchlike.
We are South African, so quite used to chaos, upheaval and uncertainty.
So we don’t really let things get us down. We believe in staying positive, and just doing what we can. We try to think of those who are less fortunate, and try and help out where we can.
We have had Lockdown here in Cape Town, South Africa, since about the middle of March.
There is a lot available, both off and online, for my 5-year-old little boy, Ashley. He is in Grade R / Kindergarten and goes to Grade 1 next year, so there is so much for him, in books, online, from his teachers, links about science, museums to visit etc.
But very little of this appeals to his baby sister Ember, who is 2-and-a-half.
We are very lucky with our two, as they play together beautifully outside in the garden, with race tracks, soft toys, bikes etc.
But in terms of learning, I have been thinking Ember wasn’t being very stimulated. I looked in the books we have and what is available, and I realised she can SAY her numbers, but not recognise them yet. And she can SAY the alphabet, but the symbols mean nothing to her.
What she is learning very well is her colours, and I thought we needed a game where she needed to match colours, or group them together. I couldn’t find anything like that, so I looked around our kitchen and spotted the recycling.
Ashley loves to build things out of the recycling, but I noticed all the great colours and prints that were in there, which were going un-utilized.
I took out a cereal box, a chocolate box and some packaging left over from Easter. Then I found some brightly-coloured containers, plastic bowls and buckets that the kids play with, leftover from Ember’s rainbow birthday party last year, and I realised Ember could put colours in buckets.
I started tearing up and cutting squares out of the recycling, making about 10 pieces of each colour. Ember wandered over then to see what I was doing, and I asked her where the red piece should go. She said “red,” and she put it in the red bowl. I started handing her the pieces and she started to play. We realised we would also need a clear container for all the plastic, and a gold and silver one too, so we found extra containers.
Ashley joined us, and started tearing up an old advertising newspaper for pictures of ham, meat and steak, to make pink, as we had nothing pick, and they played happily for quite a long time.
I’ve kept the squares of paper, so we can reuse it whenever we like. I like that my eldest was able to get involved in the creation of this game, so he didn’t feel left out. That has been one of our biggest difficulties with this Lockdown. They are normally at 2 different schools, doing quite different work, as they are 3 years apart. Neither of them wants to do anything if the other one is not involved.
Do you have any plans for future projects?
I am going to arrange scrapbooks for each child. In the elder child’s one, I am going to make it letters-based, so at the top of each page is Aa, then Bb and so on. He then needs to search for pictures of things or draw pictures of things on that page that start with the letter A (he is nearly 6), so my plan is to get him reading.
For the 2-year-old, I might do a number on each page, and she needs to stick in 5 of whatever. Perhaps I will provide stickers or pictures, or sticky dots, and she has to try and stick the right number down on each page.
Do you have any tips for others?
- We are good problem-solvers. When you get depressed, do something for someone else.
- Teach your children what happiness looks like.
- Keep smiling. Use humour.
I love Housebound with Kids as it reminds me that, wherever we are from, we are all in the same boat here – and creating a community looks like this. We are helping each other, learning from each other and sharing. It is great to be a part of Housebound with Kids.
