Welcome to the second entry in my ‘Activities for Children at Home’ series. Today, I will be sharing a range of educational activities relating to History and Geography. If you missed it, please check out yesterday’s post on Maths activities.
History
Build a Castle – Use recycled materials (cardboard, egg boxes, yoghurt pots) to design and build your very own castle. Children will need to think about the castle’s defences. Will it have a moat? A drawbridge? A portcullis? Battlements? How many turrets will it have? Will it have city walls and a central keep?
Autobiography – Children love looking at old photographs and a fun activity for them is to write a simple autobiography. They can write about key events from their life and illustrate with their own drawings and photographs. They can plan this out on a timeline, using dates and putting events in chronological order.
Project – If children are going to be at home for an extended period of time, it might be good to give them a project to work on. Give your child a significant figure from history (e.g. Florence Nightingale) or a specific time period (e.g. Egyptians) and allow them to research the topic using books, websites and documentaries. They will have the freedom to decide what information they want to include and how they want to lay out their pages.
Geography
Capital Cities – Give children access to an atlas, a globe or even Google Maps. Ask them to locate certain countries, writing down what continent they are in and what their capital city is. This is a great way to help broaden their general knowledge.
Weather Log – Each day, children can record the weather. If they keep track of the temperature, they can then plot a graph or bar chart to show how the temperature changes each day. They could also do this with rainfall if you keep a bucket outside and measure how much water has collected at the end of each day.
Flags – Children could create bunting by drawing the flags for various countries. This could be a great decoration for the house or their bedroom during the Olympics or World Cup.
Design a City – Give children the freedom to design their own city. They can draw their city as a birds’ eye view map. Whilst this a creative activity, it also gets children thinking about what buildings and businesses are necessary as well as roads, pavements, parks, traffic lights, post boxes, car parks etc.
Thanks for reading today’s post. I hope you will be able to use some of these suggestions. If you do any of these activities with your children, why not use the button below to share some pictures and let me know how you got on.
Please check back tomorrow for some Art activities. ?
