ofamily learning together

Dice Games for Kids book

Posted on December 8, 2017 by ofamily

I recently mentioned that one of the permanent parts of our Maths basket is our dice. I find dice a very versatile Maths tools, starting with basic number recognition and counting up to addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Dice are so brilliant for Maths practice and most people already have a couple in their house. We have come up with a few of our own versions of dice games but sometimes I wish I knew more dice games. Which is where this little book comes in.

Dice Games for Kids: 38 Brilliant Dice Games to Enjoy at School or Home

The book contains 38 different dice games. We are still going through them but so far the games only require – dice, paper and pencil, sometimes some counters or existing kids toys oh and some of the games do need boards but you can download these off the Activity Village website.

So what ages are the games for? From ages three. A breakdown of the games included in the book are as follows

ages 3+ = 4 games

ages 4+ = 2 games

ages 5+ = 11 games

ages 6+ = 13 games

ages 7+ = 2 games

ages 8+ = 5 games

ages 10+ = 2 games

I am a firm believer that Maths confidence comes from Maths practice and it helps to make that Maths practice fun. Dice games, especially when the family joins in together is a great way for kids to get some extra Maths practice.

Dice games are also very easy to take with you – perfect for family holidays or just to keep in your bag for those moments when we need to keep one or more kids busy while they wait.

I think it would make a great stocking filler for a parent or someone who works with children.

I personally think it has been a great addition to our Maths basket.

Here is a link for the book on Amazon – Dice Games for Kids: 38 Brilliant Dice Games to Enjoy at School or Home

I have included an Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in maths ideas | Tagged dice games, home education, homeschooling, maths activity, maths at home, maths basket, maths book | Leave a comment

Colourful Santa again

Posted on December 7, 2017 by ofamily

When my daughter was younger we printed out some colourful Santa’s from Twinkl, she loved them so when we were finished with the Santa’s I packed them away and this past week while we were trying to tidy up for our visitors the kids rediscovered the colourful Santa’s. My daughter remembered the activities that we did with the Santa’s and took “charge” or explaining everything to her brother. Naturally as it often happens with my two if the one has done something the other wants to join in or do it themselves so no big surprise my son started ordering the colourful Santa’s.

He started off my placing in them in one line and then he remembered the coloured presents that we used for writing and spelling practice (I was very impressed that he remembered the presents and knew where they were). He decided each colourful Santa needed a matching colourful present. (The pack of presents that you download does contain a pink present but ours has been misplaced).

After the presents he added the Ordinal Santa’s.

And then he decided that for writing practice he would write out each of ordinal number words on a piece of paper and add them to the correct Santa.

By the time he got to the Pink Santa he decided that Pink Santa needed to have the word pink added to his ordinal number paper as he was missing his pink present and then he decided that it would be better if he wrote the colour word underneath the ordinal word for each Santa. No prompting needed (although I do think the fact that his sister had done this a few years ago prompted him to try really hard.)

I Love it when we get to reuse our printouts over and over again and I really think the colourful presents worked well with the colourful Santa’s.

The colourful Santas are part of Twinkl’s classic collection

The colourful Presents are Free to download from Twinkl – we printed ours out a few years ago and reduced the size to 4 presents on a page.

The Ordinal Numbered Santas are part of Twinkl’s classic collection. We printed our out in Black and White but they also have a colour version

All Twinkl Links are correct at the time of me writing this post.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged Christmas ideas, colour words, Colourful Santa's, home education, homeschooling, ordinal numbers, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Linking Decimals to Fractions

Posted on December 5, 2017 by ofamily

Maths for my daughter needs to include using her hands and being involved. Giving her worksheet after worksheet without using manipulatives does not work for her. While we have been working on decimals we have once again been using our Learning Resources Fraction Tower Cubes Equivalency Set. We first started using these when we looked at Equivalent fractions and my daughter loved them.

In case you have not seen this set before they have the fraction on one side, the decimal on the other and then the percentage a third side. The set comes with 9 different towers – whole, halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, eighths, tenths and twelfths.

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They are also all made to scale so the half piece is the same size as two of the quarter pieces or three of the sixth pieces. We have found them to be brilliant fraction manipulatives to have in the house (and they appear to be fairly hard-wearing – we have used them quite a bit over the past year including having the pieces mixed up with play dough, on the kitchen table covered in flour and cookie dough and so far we have been able to clean them every time. My sons also dropped them onto a hard floor and they were fine).

They are great for kids to use when they are learning how to convert fractions to decimals (or percentages) and are perfect for some basic decimal sums. We used them as a visual way of showing that adding and multiplying decimals is not such a scary thing. (Can not stress how is makes multiplying decimals easy – 6 groups of 0.1 is 0.6. When I first mention multiplying decimals my daughter looked a bit shocked but when we started talking about it with the cube pieces she totally understood).

I have included an Affiliate link. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in maths ideas | Tagged converting fractions to decimals, decimals, fractions, home education, homeschooling, ks2, learning resources | Leave a comment

Lucy’s Magic Snow Globe

Posted on December 3, 2017 by ofamily

I have mentioned a few times that my daughter tends to stick to certain types of reading books – she likes factual, non-fiction books as that way she does not have to deal with characters who get injured or kids who are lost. We have tried really hard this past year to find her suitable fiction stories that do not scare her and we have had some success (the Oxford Children’s Classic Series has been great) but I really wanted to find some lighter reading for her. Books that could capture her imagination without making her anxious. This past week she read Lucy’s Magic Snow Globe to herself and afterwards she told me – “Mum I actually felt like I was in the story”. She Loved it.

The story is part of a set but the stories are fine as read alone books (so far my daughter has read the 2nd book in the series – Lucy’s Magic Snow Globe and has started the third one Lucy’s Winter Rescue and she never read the first one and it has not affected her enjoyment or understanding at all).

She is finding them easy, quick reads but is really loving the gentle storyline and the way the characters are developed in the story. She does have a soft spot for small animals so the fact that the stories are based around Lucy, a little girl who rescues injured / sick animals and then nurses them back to health with her grandmother, who runs an animal rescue center, makes them perfect for her.

I would say you could read the stories to younger kids (aged 4 or 5), or use them as reading practice for kids from age 7. The books also contain stunning black and white illustrations and they manage to include some facts about the animals in the stories.

Oh and all the stories are based around Christmas time (they all start in the month of December as the family are starting to gear up for their holidays). So they are fun to read over the festive season but honestly they could be read and enjoyed at any time of the year.

The books in the series are

Lucy’s Secret Reindeer

Lucy’s Magic Snow Globe

Lucy’s Winter Rescue

Lucy’s Magical Surprise

We have the last three and as I mentioned have read the whole of Lucy’s Magic Snow Globe, started Lucy’s Winter Rescue but yet not read any of Lucy’s Magical Surprise.

The three books that we have were kindly sent to us by Oxford University Press. And you can find out more about the books written by Anne Booth on their website – Oxford University Press

I have included Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we love.

Posted in Book Ideas | Tagged Animal Tales, children's book, Christmas reading for kids, home education, homeschooling, Winter Tales | Leave a comment

5 favourite new home-ed items from 2017

Posted on December 1, 2017 by ofamily

I am very lucky that my blog has now gotten to that stage where we sometimes get to test out educational activities and books. It is without a doubt a big bonus when you are home-educating as let’s be honest it is really helpful to have some high quality educational tools in the house so that the kids can access them whenever they want. So I thought some of you might find it interesting to hear what out top 5 items from 2017 are (in no order).

K’nex

We received the K’nex gears and K’nex levers and pulley set earlier this year. It was the first ever K’nex that my kids had played with and they just fell in love with it – so much so that I have since bought them 4 more boxes so that they can build complex items together.

My daughter has never been that big on construction toys but K’nex changed that. She started following the instructions, starting with the easy builds, moving onto very complex builds and then designing her own creations. And my son, well he is just in K’nex heaven. I honestly belive that the K’nex is going to be something that they will both play with for years to come. And learning well – they learnt about how gears, pulley’s and levers work. They learnt how to design doors with hinges so they could swing open, angles, shapes and that honestly that is just the start. I can not say enough good things about our K’nex. It is amazing.

Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity Set.

Our kids don’t tend to spend lots of time on screens, we have found with their sensory challenges that screens are not good, my daughter gets overwhelmed very quickly and my son just gets grumpy. We also found that learning apps on screens are not a big success with our two, they do better if they are learning using their hands to pick up items and move items around so the result of that is we have not done any coding activities. Because of this the Code & Go Mouse Activity Set really appealed to me and from the moment we unwrapped it both kids loved it.

They loved programming the mouse to find the cheese. The activity cards included in the set were a great starting point and now my two just have fun with Colby (the mouse has a name), they build their own mazes for him and get him to move backwards, swing around and do a bunch of interesting stuff. I think it has been a great introduction to coding for them.

Schofield & Sims Written Calculation Multiplication and Division workbooks.

Okay we were not actually sent these, I bought both books, but we have been sent other Schofield & Sims workbooks this year (fraction set, telling time) and the Maths workbooks are without a doubt my daughter’s favourite. The format really suits her. She likes the brief explanation and the fact that they build up the exercises very slowly with lots of practice. She was not feeling confident with multiplication and division earlier this year and working through the Written Calculation: Multiplication Book 1 – KS2, Ages 7-11 and Written Calculation: Division Book 1 – KS2, Ages 7-11 has helped change that for her. I am going to be buying her the Written Calculation: Multiplication Book 2 – KS2, Ages 7-11 and Written Calculation: Division Book 2 – KS2, Ages 7-11 next year.

Oxford Children’s Classic Stories.

Earlier this year my daughter discovered an audio set of classic children’s stories Ladybird Classics: The Complete Audio Collection and she fell in love with a few of the classic children stories. She begged me for ages to find her versions of the stories that were more detailed than the audio stories and I actually struggled a bit until I found the Oxford Children’s Classic books and we got to test three of them.

We are reading the books slowly but the whole family LOVES them (they have become a favourite for reading together ). I think having classics like these in the house is amazing and I am definitely going to be adding to our collection.

Dive Into Shapes

My son is slightly obsessed with this set. And I must admit that even though I asked to review this set it actually exceeded all of my expectations. Shapes, angles, how shapes can fit together to form more complex shapes, how you can divide shapes into halves and quarters, drawing shapes (yes we found that using the rods and connectors to create shapes helped the kids understand how to draw the 3 dimensional shapes).

Both my kids have also used this set to create them own objects – crowns, shields and swords (okay slight medieval theme), a bed and sleigh for some toys, a barn for the animals and I am sure I am forgetting a whole bunch of others. This is shape magic.

Okay that is 5 already but can I add one more ? My Activity Village membership. I am loving all the new pages they have been adding this year – I think the maths, famous people, alphabet pages and the colouring quotes are possibly our favourites.

I would like to mention that if we ever receive an item which is not up to standard I point-blank refuse to write a post or share photos. I have a rule when it comes to items sent to us – If I would not pay the asking price for that item then I will not include it in the blog.