Back To School Fun With Learning Resources

We are now a week into being back at school. After such a long time at home, with little routine or a need to be anywhere, it feels rather odd getting up and ready for a school day.

It’s also been a bit of a nice welcome having the structure return and it’s meant that weekends are a time to cherish with family.

After spending some gruelling months doing virtual home learning with my three daughters, I thought it would be difficult to ever sit down and do anything remotely educational with them ever again! But then Learning Resources sent us a package of educational bits to aid our back to school journey.

I can’t believe how much my girls love these products so I wanted to share each one as they have their qualities.

Mathlink Cubes Early Maths Starter Set - £16.50

I purchased my own set of 100 Mathlinks cubes during lockdown to help with home learning and found them the perfect tool for helping my girls visually understand certain maths problems.

This MathLink Cubes Activity Set comes with 100 cubes that are in 10 sets of 10 colours. Each cube is 2cm in diameter so the perfect size for little hands to hold. We also noticed that they have different shapes inside them too.

This set also has 15 activity cards. Thankfully there’s a booklet inside, a bit like an instruction manual, that explains each card because I didn’t think they were that self-explanatory.

Although the concept of the cubes with activity cards seems quite basic, this set is developing a whole host of basic numeracy skills including patterning and sequencing, sorting and grouping, addition, subtraction and multiplication, size and colour recognition, ordering and even measurement.

We used them a lot for helping with our fractions home learning and counting too.

Eva and I particularly liked the activity card which was a four in a row game, we played this together for quite a few rounds. Eva wasn’t too impressed that I kept winning.

You can purchase the set by clicking here.

Sum Swamp - £13

The Sum Swamp Addition & Subtraction Game was impressive. At first, I played it with my eldest daughter who is 11 years old and just started secondary school, it was definitely too young for her but we had such a laugh playing it and trying to race to the finish line.

I then roped my husband and other two daughters who are 5 and 7 years old. It was a bit tricky for my youngest and she lost interest quite quickly but Eva loved it.

You roll three dice; two number die and one operation die. You then use these to make a number sentence, and the answer is how many spaces you move. There are a few special landing spots like odds and evens, where you need to roll a certain number to be able to move. Of course, a board game wouldn’t be a board game without a shortcut and then there’s the endless loop to keep you on your toes.

The Sum Swamp game challenged Eva’s numeracy skills but in a gentle way. This game provided us with lots of laughs as my husband kept accidentally calling out the answers and us girls tried to beat him to the finish line.

You can buy the Sum Swamp game by clicking here.

Sight Word Swat - £15.50

Eva played this Sight Word Swat game with her tutor first so I was eager to experience this for myself too. It’s a high-frequency words game that is suitable for ages 4 and above. You can play on your own or with up to four players.

The game comes with four different colours fly swats and 150 double-sided flies. The flies contain 300 high-frequency words and are colour coded for the different phonics phases.

The Sight Word Swat game also has tricky words highlighted in a yellow font so that children can start to recognise and memorise these which will help with their reading experience.

I love the way this game can be customised depending on the child or children you are playing with. It can be fast-paced or not. It’s limitless and lots of competitive fun whilst learning too.

Elsa, who is now in Year 1, sometimes struggles to participate with learning as she has Selective Mutism. Playing this game alongside her sister allowed us to see how many words she knew. It was wonderful.

You can get the Sight Word Swat game by clicking here.

TacklingTables - £10

Our tutor for Eva tried these out for the first time and was so impressed, she wants to buy her own set because she found them so useful.

The tacklingtables is a card game for times tables success. Quite simply, the set includes 78 colour-coded cards, a times table chart and guide. The Blue cards cover the 1, 2, 5 and 10 times tables, then the Green is the 3, 4 and 8 times tables, and getting into the harder 6, 7, 9, 11 and 12 times tables with the Red cards.

Each card looks similar with three numbers on it. The quiz leader chooses the colour-coordinated deck correct for the teaching level, selects a card from the deck and hides the answer. The two outer numbers can be multiplied to reveal the middle number as the answer. Then the top and middle, or bottom and middle, can be divided with each other.

The game aims to answer within 3 seconds, the child would then win that card and the person with the most cards at the end will win the game. It’s very simple but of course only simple if you know your times’ tables.

This card game helps the child to gain the confidence and knowledge of their times’ tables which is a very important part of their maths journey. It can be used for all school ages and I’m excited to have these at home to help us with homework and home learning.

You can buy the TacklingTables set by clicking here.

So that is the four pretty awesome Learning Resources products that I wanted to share with you today. I am always rather excited by an LR delivery as I spend hours trawling their website as it’s full of educational ideas and products to aid all sorts of home learning things.

I also wanted to share with you a video that Freya and I created that showcases these products so much better which I hope you’ll take some time to watch. We called it Educational Fun With Learning Resources. 

Disclosure: This is a gifted product and post contains affiliate links.