Home Education with Learning Resources Review

*Ad Gifted. All opinions are my own.

I count myself incredibly lucky that in a former life I was a teacher. Although thanks to a world pandemic I still felt panicked and concerned about trying to teach my daughter, it wasn’t totally alien to me. I was an English and Drama teacher of secondary aged children as well as an EFL teacher when I lived in Italy. It is very different teaching a primary aged child and let’s face it, I am not her teacher. I am her mum and she knows that and whilst initially she thought it was a great role play game that mummy was a teacher, it did not last for long! Luckily, whilst offering help, her school has primarily given us topics to follow and links to resources and told us the only thing they would really like us to do, is make sure they read. If you follow me on Facebook and Instagram, you will have seen me sharing some of my home schooling ideas and actually we have had some fun doing it. Equally when she has been fed up and needed a day off we have taken one. I think the trick is to keep it fun, so when Learning resources offered to let us review their Sum Swamp Game and Money Activity Set I thought these would be great boredom busting activities to tie in with home schooling.

Sum Swamp Learning Resources Review

When it comes to home educating, I find that if Alyssa doesn’t realise she is learning I can get away with a lot more. We have had maths Olympics, making creatures from shapes and even Wordsearch Junior to practise reading. The Sum Swamp game was a complete gem to discover when trying to teach addition, subtraction, odds and evens as well as still having fun.

It states for ages 5+ but Alyssa is 4 and by using our fingers, she manages this game perfectly fine. There can be 2-4 players at a time who are either a frog, dragonfly, snail or crocodile. You have to roll 3 dice – 2 with numbers and one with a +/- on it. You then add or subtract the numbers to find out how many spaces you can move. There are shortcut spaces, as well as places you can move extra if you roll an odd or an even number.

You can also get stuck in a never ending loop, if you don’t land on the exit square – so frustrating!! Alyssa asks to play this game every day we do lessons and she has no clue how much it is helping her with her maths plus it is an easy option for me when I am trying to do everything solo!

Money Activity Set Learning Resources Review

One of the suggested tasks from school was to make our own shop and practice some role playing and money work. We randomly didn’t own ANY play money or pretend shops or anything like that so the Money Activity Set from Learning Resources was perfect as it provided her with coins and notes that ACTUALLY look like our money so she can learn the value of real money.

Again, this set states from 5+ but we can use the money to play role play with our shop. It also comes with an activity book of suggested activities and we used the spinner to sort out money so she could recognise similar coins and sort them. There are puzzle shop pieces as well as price tags which are super handy for playing shop.

If your child likes role playing shops AND you want an easy way to teach them some maths, counting and about money, then this is a definite must have tool!