Make Learning Fun

I don’t know about you but I mostly enjoyed school I have to say. I was and still am a bit of a geek and am proud to say that I did well at school. However, even I had subjects that I didn’t like or teachers that made me want to fall asleep. When I became a teacher I knew that I needed to make learning fun and interesting as I did NOT want to fall into the boring teacher category and wanted the children to look forward to my lessons. I used to spend hours and hours creating powerpoints that transformed into Jeopardy style games with the questions and answers being on the topics that we were covering in class – teaching was never a 9 til 5 job! It was worth it though to see the kids happy about coming to class and this was spurred on by them knowing they were working towards another game session with prizes. I am no longer a teacher but have done some private tutoring for A-Level students and now for my nephew who is about to take his Year 6 SATS. I have been out of teaching for a while now and didn’t have any resources to help me support him in my own subjects let alone the one’s I hadn’t taught. However, a solution landed right in front of me…

Unfortunately, Rowan has a teacher this year that he is not particularly fond of. If you are wondering if it is just him, no it’s not as apparently several children are having issues in his class and are not wanting to go to school which is a shame. When this happens, children become disengaged with what is happening and don’t put much effort into learning. However, he is a bit of a worrier so to help him learn and get to where he wants and needs to be, I said I would do some revision with him for his SATs and we have been doing it for the past couple of months.

My sister bought us some complete workbooks to go through which covers every topic and whilst these are good, if he is bored or has had a bad day it was quite hard initially to keep him focused as he just wanted to be done which is when he makes mistakes and in turn gets frustrated. It was at this point I longed for the Powerpoints I had once made but unfortunately they were gone and I honestly didn’t have time to make them all over again so I hit Google and it was there that I came across Education Quizzes.

“Our primary objective is to help children to be successful at school. Study of the school curriculums is made easy and enjoyable with our suites of KS1, KS2, 11-Plus, KS3 and GCSE quizzes. “

It is a fantastic website that covers everything from the start of school all the way to GCSE and even covers EFL as well which would have been very handy when I was teaching in Italy. The quizzes are all written by teachers as well which in my mind makes them more credible too. Access is paid for on a monthly subscription basis or if you get your school interested, they do special deals for schools too where it can cost as little as £2 per student!

Rowan loves computers and is one of the top in his class for them so when I told him we would be doing some revision on the computer from now on he looked at me rather suspiciously at first. However, we logged in and we spent one of his study sessions exploring the website and then agreed that half of his tutoring time would be spent on the workbooks and the rest spent on Education Quizzes so long as he doesn’t rush and have too many mistakes in his workbook. Well, I have to say it has made a huge difference to our study time. The tears are gone and he is actually enjoying learning and at a recent parents evening his teacher commented to my sister and brother-in-law what an improvement she had seen is Rowan’s knowledge and understanding and that he was pretty much at where he needed to be for his exams – woohoo!!

The exams are coming next week and I have my fingers and toes crossed for him to do well but as long as he does his best that is all that matters to me. If you have children who need help or simply need to see the fun side of learning, then you should definitely have a look at Education Quizzes as they cater for all ages, curriculum and exams too. It has really made a difference to the tutoring I had  done with Rowan and I shall be keeping it in mind for any more I do in the future!

This is a collaborative post – all thoughts and opinions are my own.