Lockdown Learning With Learning Resources -

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We are about to enter week eleven of homeschooling now. We have enjoyed it a lot more than I thought we would to be honest. Some days it has been stressful, some days we have thrown it in the bin and played in the garden or sat and watched too much TV, but generally, we have done okay. The kid’s schools have been great with sending work – they don’t expect too much, and it is up to us if we do it or not. We have been using a mixture of that and our own stuff to keep us going.

One of the things that all three boys have had on their ‘lockdown learning‘ curriculum is money. Like lots of families now, we pay by card most of the time, and rarely have any cash on us, so the kids don’t have a lot of experience with physical money. Even their pocket money is paid to their Go Henry accounts. However, the superb Money Activity set that my favourite brand, Learning Resources, sent us is an excellent resource to help support the teaching and understanding of it.

It’s priced at £15 and I think that’s pretty good value for what you get with it. There are 70 plastic coins, 15 paper notes, 8 double-sided price tags, 12 double-sided puzzle cards, a wipe-clean piggy bank card, and a spinner. Each of these can be used in a variety of ways.

We have been using it alongside our previously gifted Learning Resources till to make a pet shop for Ben. They all got involved in the end, adding up the costs of the animals, working out the correct change, and naming the different coins. We have also used it to support addition and multiplication so far. It is an incredibly versatile resource for homeschooling.

Another fantastic resource that we were sent which has been a godsend during this time is Sight Word Swat, priced at £15.50. Ben is in reception, so sight words is a big thing for him at the moment. He’s quite an active little boy, and something that involves him moving his body and being a bit more physical really helps him learn. This is PERFECT.

It contains 300 high-frequency words from phases two to six of the Letters and Sounds Phonics Framework, including tricky words which can’t be sounded out phonetically,s something that Ben finds a little more difficult. The game comes with four brightly coloured ‘fly swatters’, and the general idea of the game is to be the first to swat the words as they are read out.

Being super competitive, the boys loved it. It got noisy, it got boisterous but there was plenty of learning and consolidation going on with all of them. I’ve also used them in other ways – counting the syllables in the words with Harrison, organising word families with Alex, and so on. I may even put these into a post of their own when I get a chance, so watch this space!