Learning Resources for Children

I’ve worked in primary schools for many years; in mainstream classroom settings and supporting children with various special educational needs. Here’s a list of great resources that you can use to aid and educate your children.

Snip

http://www.snip-newsletter.co.uk/downloads.php.. Look down the list for the ‘Snip Literacy programme part 1’. You can start with this one 🙂 If literacy is your choice, if not, try another.

This was developed by two dyslexic tutors, who saw the need to help and address the problems to learning faced by children with learning disabilities and needs. They have developed a range of different techniques to help children to become competent and confident readers. I used this literacy programme with a child I was supporting and it worked really well.  There are many different supporting teaching aids for you to download and use, including ‘Literacy programmes from 1-4, well-being, maths resources and so on…

The 20 plus packs include words taken from the National Literacy Strategy High Frequency word
lists, Year 1 to 5. Each pack targets 9 words and has 3 pages with 6 exercises:

• Look, say, cover, write and check
• Tracking
• Anagrams
• Fill in the missing letters/words
• Crossword and wordsearch

1. Begin with reading the words out loud, starting with the first set.
2. Look, say, cover, write and check in the first column, taking one word at a time.
3. Tracking. The word is repeated twice in a line of jumbled up letters. The child finds the first letter; say the word is ‘put’, they run along the letters until they find the letter ‘p’, draw a circle around the letter, then find the ‘u’, say the letter, circle and so on….
Other exercises could include;
• Anagrams – putting the letters in the correct order, and saying out loud.
• Writing out the capital letters.
• Matching word shapes. Putting the letters that make the word into the correct boxes. This aids the formation of letters and their size.
• Putting in a missing word.
• Crossword – Aims to write and say out the practised word, and understand the meanings.
• Wordsearch – all target words written diagonally or horizontally. Enables the child to practice again the letter formation and the use of capital letters.

Have a good look at the website. There are many other subjects that you can use. It’s very good and very beneficial for teaching.

Phonics Play

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/

A great site used in schools to help children learn to read by using interactive games etc. There are the 6 phases of phonics (learning to read by recognising that letters have a sound). These are all the phases that your child will progress through from reception year. The site is free to use at the moment.

Purple Mash  

https://www.purplemash.com/

A fantastic, as they say ‘mash up of curriculum focused activities, programs and games to support and inspire the creative learning of children’. It’s used online, so is easily accessed. It has a free no obligation trial, and children really do love it. I can’t seem to share the YouTube link, so if you can, pop ‘purple mash’ on there ,and click on ‘the new purple mash layout’. It lasts for about 1 minute and will give you a brief explanation on how to navigate across the site.

Abracadabra

https://literacy.concordia.ca/resources/abra/teacher/en/

Exactly 6 years ago, I was working at a primary school in England and myself and a colleague had some training with a newly developed system of teaching children to read using ‘Abracadabra’. It’s an interactive programme for children to use, that teaches them from year 1 (age 5-6), to read using phonics phase 1, and continues in a way that’s engaging and fun. There are sections on decoding, segmenting and plenty of opportunities to practice.

If you access the link above, you go onto the main page. Scroll down, and click ‘access abra‘. This will take you to the student zone. Once in, you choose one of four from the activities strip at the top. These include, sounds letter and words, reading, understanding the story or writing. Next, you choose from the books strip underneath. These include, folk and fairy tales, poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Click one of these and then the yellow bag in the bottom right corner will be highlighted. You now click on this and off you go!!

It becomes self -explanatory as the programme progresses, but it’s well worth using. Just one thing about the different activities and book strips. If you press one from above and one from below, and the yellow bag does not highlight, it’s OK, it just means that those two suggestions don’t work together. For example…poetry may not have an activity with writing. It’s just how the programme is laid out. You’ll understand when you’ve had a few go’s with it.

Top Marks Maths

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/5-7-years/counting

An interactive maths programme that uses games to aid and stimulate little minds in using maths effectively. This is a great one to use, and many children I have worked with really enjoy it. When you go to the main page, there are the different age ranges laid out across the top. 3-5 years, 5-7, 7-11 and 11-14. Underneath there are 13 categories, (3-5 years) to choose from, and once clicked, a range of maths games will pop up below that you can choose from. There are different categories for the age ranges highlighted.

I hope you find some of these suggestions beneficial for your children x