At the shops

Listening skills

• Listen out for different sounds
• Can you hear the noise the box of cereal makes when you shake it?
• Talk about what sounds you hear in the supermarket

Learning new words

• Name things as you put them in the trolley, unpack them or write your shopping list
• Talk about how things look and feel - colour, texture, weight

Following instructions

• Ask your child to find things that you name - e.g. 'can you find the bananas?'.
• Or show them a picture of the thing you want them to find
• Make sure you name it out loud too!
• If it's too easy then ask them to find 2 or 3 things!
• Find things by description, e.g. 'can you find something red/round/big?'

Talk about what category things belong to

• When you are unpacking the shopping talk about where things belong
• 'Should we put the milk in the fridge or in the cupboard?'
• 'I'm going to put the oranges in the fruit bowl with the other fruit - apples and bananas'
• Try deliberately putting things in the wrong place - children love it when grown-ups are silly!

Play around with sounds

• Talk about the sound that things begin with - 'I bought some biscuits, that begins with a b sound'
• Have fun with clapping out the syllables in food names, for example, 'listen to how many claps are in banana -ba-na-na, that's 3 claps!'
• Think of rhyming words (real or made-up words) for things that you unpack from your shopping bags!