Fuel for Imagination - Ideas Gratefully Accepted!

[realmum]

I have a six year old girl who has been on the G&T register since she was four (not that it achieves anything for her but there you go). Her main love is reading, she has a wonderful imagination and she enjoys role-playing at home and at school.
She gets no homework from school and is probably not stretched - I'm not pushy and don't want to overload her with academic stuff. But really want to keep her interested and enthused about life, books, everything.
Any suggestions would be very welcome - my own imagination is a bit limited and I often find it difficult to enter into her "games". She's an only child too so can't boss little ones into joining in!
Thank-you...

I loved the Mary Plain books - bit Paddingtonish but Mary Plain is a girl bear and gets into worse messes than Paddington.

Can you build a den? In the house at the moment - but if you can get a big cardboard box it would probably survive quite a while in the summer if it was somewhere sheltered.

Ds and I do lots of investigating of the things we see when we're on walks - how to recognise different trees (with no leaves), birds (sometimes by song or flight only) and wildflowers - at this time of year this is good with lots of new flowers comign through - you might even be able to get an Eye Spy book to assist with this.

Make masks together - and get her to design one for you too and get her to tell you what you are and what you should be doing.

get some finger puppets, or make 'puppets' from dressed up wooden spoons - make a theatre from a cardboard box and get her to work out a story to show someone (just you if necessary!)

Write a letter to someone about what you've done today and post it off....

Look up things on the internet with them - I looked up whether a Koala could swim last week - its amazing what questions come up!

Have you got any good museums close by? My dad used to take me to a different museum one Sunday a month and I loved it.

so, can a koala swim or not?

don't know where you live but she's probably old enough to get a lot out of a museum/gallery trip?

it's great if she can follow her own interests, if she wants to find out about a particular animal/place/food or something, get lots of books out (doesn't matter if they're above her reading level), look at websites etc.

what about getting her a scrapbook and making her own encyclopaedia? she could choose a topic for a page and you could print out/draw pictures, write a bit about them (you might have to actually write but she could tell you the words). you could do a page each weekend or something - if you do it together, it'd be a great way of showing how fun learning can be.

if she's crafty, expand the scrapbook suggestion into lapbooks (can't find a link at the moment, but google it) - there are a lot of basic templates around, then you/she could make her own using the different booklet designs.

Now everyone is going to be googling whether a Koala can swim or not... I don't think that it is common, but the video of one swimming a river on YouTube clearly shows that they're quite good at it if they have a go - and then ds enjoyed looking at the hedgehog clips that came up on the same page....

google is your friend
write stories, poems,
keep a diary
find a penpal in a different country
read more non fiction
try and find something she can develop into a hobby - animals, cars, sewing, anything!
subscribe to kids national geographic
take up an instrument
learn a language

I haven't done a quarter of what I've suggested - I'd never sleep! Just some ideas I've had or have seen.

Thank-you for all of these - really. Like I said, I've no imagination of my own, but these are all really good ideas (maybe one at a time though!!!) --- anyone got any more?

If you have it, try making a slide show with her on the PC with Powerpoint on any topic-use clip art, google searches, different fonts. She'll soon be better at it than you are.

Nessy fingers programme-learning to type will be very beneficial and worth starting soon.

Aquila-very good magazine, also join the RSPB for their kids magazine, lots of competitions and fun ideas every month or so.

Local library-we go every week and max out three cards! and their summer reading scheme if they do it this year.

Super websites- to enter their own work securely myths.e2bn.org/ and www.publishinghouse.me.uk/

drama classes if you can afford time and cost.