Lucky dip

What you need

• A tub or box
• Shredded tissue paper/scrap paper
• Few random objects, such as animals, kitchen ingredients (e.g. garlic, ginger, banana, oranges etc), cars, buses. These are just examples, it would work with any other objects found in the house.

Benefits

Communication and language development; possibility to introduce new vocabulary; describing words and colours.

The experience

Place the random objects in the tub/box covered by shredded tissue paper. Ask your child to ‘fish’ for an object. Once they have chosen one, talk about it – point out all the details, the colour, the size. Is it hard? Is it soft? Using as much descriptive vocabulary as you can. Ask the child to explore as much as possible - can you smell it? Can you taste it?

Try having long discussions, remembering to allow your child 10 seconds to answer a question. If it’s an object/ingredient they haven’t seen before, try and put it into context, e.g. mummy or daddy uses this when they cook. Keep going back to the tub to pick another object and describe it. Can you compare objects?