Activity ideas

picture of happy children outside in the sunshine surrounded by bluebells

3 Sensory Activities to Celebrate Spring

Does your little one love to explore the world around them? Springtime, with beautiful blooms, baby animals, and sunshine-filled days, is a magical time for children to discover new sights, sounds, and textures.

Busy Bees , believe in fostering a love of learning through play, and sensory activities are a fantastic way to do this!

Jenny Shaw, Lead Academic Research and Developer at...

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5 tips for starting your child's reading journey, with Phonics from Robot Reg.

Learning to read is an essential skill for children. It helps them access knowledge and opens up a world of possibilities for them. But teaching a child to read can be a daunting task for many parents. Especially if your child doesn't already have a love of books and prefers other kinds of play.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to help parents guide their children in...

picture of Number matching maths tuff tray activity for kids

Match the number to the Word activity

My children are loving maths activities at the moment, so we have been making some simple maths tuff trays. For this one, all I did was write the numbers 1-10 in both numerical and word form. Then I asked my children to draw a line to match up the words and numbers. This taught my children so many skills, like number and word recognition, plus they had lots of fun doing it.

If you...

Fish adding and taking away tuff tray

My daughter is really loving maths at the moment and asked me if I could write her some sums for when she came home from school.

I decided to make this a bit more fun by using fish instead of numbers. By using an object instead of a number it also meant she needed to practice her counting skills.

My drawing skills aren’t fantastic so fish seemed to be an easy to thing to...

picture of Times table grid 1 to 12 tuff tray activity for kids

Times table grid 1-12

My son loves learning his times tables at the moment, so I thought I would make him a times table grid for him to fill in.

What you need for this activity

⬛️ Tuff tray or paper 🖊️ pens suitable to your surface 📏 ruler if you want the lines to be really neat

The longest part of creating this activity was creating the grid! If you want this to look perfect you can use a ruler...

Monster Truck slide painting

My son loves making ramps out of all kinds of things to push his monster trucks down, so I thought I would turn it into a painting activity! What you need: 🚘 a ramp - we used a slide but you can use any kind of ramp you can find 🚘 tuff tray or something similar to catch the monster trucks at the bottom of the ramp 🚘 paper 🚘monster trucks 🚘sellotape 🚘paint How to do the activity

🚘 I used...

picture of Learning how to spell with your car loving child

Learning to spell with your car loving child

Trying to get my son away from his cars to sit firm and learn about cars was always really tricky, so I decided to bring the learning to his car play mat! My son really loved this activity and didn’t even realise that he was learning at the same time, which is always a bonus!

What you will need for this activity

🚘 a car playmat. If you don’t have one you can always try making one...

Learning to count with bricks and cars

My son loves cars so we try to include them in lots of our learning activities. For this activity we are learning about counting and measuring.

For this activity you need :

Different sized cars, we used a variety from big trucks to little sports cars
Lego blocks, the smaller bricks are better as you will use more and encourage them to count more.
Paper

Zog and the flying doctors tuff tray

This has been another one of our favourite bedtime stories, so was another great choice for us to turn into a tuff tray activity.

What you need for this activity

Tuff tray
Princess
Dragon
Knight
King
A unicorn
A lion
A mermaid

We were lucky that we had a toy castle to use, but you can...

The Tiger who came to Tea tuff tray

The Tiger who came to Tea is such a lovely book, which we love reading at bedtime. As my children love it so much, I used it to make a tuff tray activity.

I had to be quite resourceful to create this tray and dipped into lots of different toy boxes to get all the characters, but it was well worth it for the fun we had.

What you need for your tuff tray:

• Sophie character •...