We all want to ensure that our child makes an easy transition into school. They need a really broad range of skills so that they cope easily in a school environment.
Here are some easy to use educational activities to build key executive functioning skills to make all the difference for your child’s ongoing success!
1. Perfect fine motor movement
Make use of any of the Yay4Play activities that include manipulatives. This a a great way of ensuring that your child will be able to build finger and hand skills so that they can write, cut and open boxes easily.
One of our favorites is to use clothes pegs to pick up objects.
All our Yay4Play activity kits contain pegs that children use to pick up the bricks and stack them in different ways. For example, build towers or other shapes. Your child won’t even realise that they are developing their fine motor movement as they will be having so much fun.
2. Patterning
It’s essential that school ready children have the ability to fulfil multi-step tasks to achieve a clear outcome or result.
The Yay4Play Premium and Ultimate kits all contain patterns that children follow as a way of learning how to plan and sequence.
You can also develop your own patterns using toys that you have at home. For example: cups and spoons. Your pattern could be 2 spoons, 1 cup, 3 spoons, 1 cup, 2 spoons, 1 cup and so on.
Your child copies the pattern you have set and keeps developing it themselves.
3. Emotional Development
You would like your child to understand their own emotions and regulate them. That is why I love our ‘Emotions and Me’ activities that are included in the Ultimate Kit.
If you don’t have a Yay4Play kit, you can copy this type of activity by asking your child to draw different emotions. What does happy look like? What does sad look like? You can talk through with them what it would take to transform from sad into happy.
4. Self-regulation
This is a way to focus and maintain attention levels that are appropriate for a task. Any activity that has a scaffolded layer of instructions will develop this type of skill.
Give a few instructions at once that encourages your child to listen attentively and follow the instructions in the correct sequence.
All the Yay4Play activities are structured to continuously develop this skill.