However, particularly in the current crisis where parents are home schooling their children, it is really important to understand that learning happens not only when children are doing school worksheets, but through their engagement in everyday activities.

Sometimes all it takes to turn a routine activity into a rich learning experience is the way we interact with children, and that requires us to recognise what learning opportunities exist.

Let's think about cooking for example.

Children can share food preparation tasks and we can use these opportunities to teach many different things.

Younger children can enhance their hand fine motor skills which will help them with their writing as they help peel and cut vegetables.

A discussion about how to grow each of the vegetables as they are being peeled helps learn basic science and might even lead to a small joint gardening project.

A discussion of what happens to the vegetable when it is cooked helps learn more advanced science, and what parents do not know can be researched together on the internet, not only helping to learn science but developing research skills.

Exploring the taste of different vegetables, cooked and uncooked, can lead to discussions on heathy nutrition.

Sharing the prepared food around family members is an exercise in understanding fractions (parents are well aware of the meltdowns resulting from children thinking a sibling has one ATOM more than themselves).

Sharing their discoveries with others - perhaps using one of the many apps that enable children to create books and/or presentations - offers opportunities to enhance literacy.

An online session each afternoon or evening with grandparents, other family members or friends presenting their explorations for the day helps bring people together and helps children feel excited about their work, as well as enhancing their learning as they share information with others (it is my experience that teaching something to others helps me secure my own learning).

The changing weather provides multiple opportunities to learn across many academic areas.

Measuring the growth of different plants or weeds in the garden and linking growth rates to changing temperatures during the day not only provides maths practice it also addresses science learning.

Measurements can be really basic for younger children and more complex for older children (perhaps a simple measure of height, or a more complex calculation trying to ascertain volume from a combination of height, width and weight).

Older children might compare growth rates in different parts of the garden, calculating soil moisture, amount of sun exposure and depth of frost.

Challenge them to research on the internet and find ways to measure these elements with the resources they have in the home.

Again, recording results and developing these into a presentation to share with family or friends provides literacy experiences as well as addressing social and emotional needs to maintain links with people outside the immediate home context.

Families are probably having more screen time whilst we are in lockdown and we can also use this activity to create different learning opportunities.

Older children can be asked to critique the movies they are watching - what are the key messages in the movies, how are these messages conveyed, how would the key messages change if the lead character was different (depending on the movie, perhaps of a different ethnicity, gender, or personality)? What other movies convey similar messages? How do you feel about this message? Is it an okay message to share widely? What alternative messages might counter this one? Where can these counter-messages be found?

Younger children might enjoy a family game of word bingo - create cards with different words and listen for those words in the movie, marking each word off the card as it is spoken in the movie. This helps young children with their literacy skills as they not only have to listen for the word, they then have to match it on their card.

Preschool children might play other forms of bingo - looking for particular objects in a movie or listening for particular sounds. Again, the matching of the object/sound on the screen with the object on their bingo card is an early literacy skill.

The important thing to remember is that children will learn more effectively when they have a balance of formal (sitting down with a worksheet) and informal learning opportunities.

It is our challenge in home schooling our children, to learn how to use our every day activities to create interesting and engaging informal learning opportunities.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel, nor purchase expensive kits.

Learning can and should be fun as it is woven into our everyday lives.