Whether you are a home educator or a parent who suddenly has to help with distance learning while the kids are at home there are a number of useful pages from the Activity Village website. So with everything going on at the moment I thought I would share a few of our favourite pages, but please these are just our favourite ones, there is a lot more on the site.
I have to start with the Acrostic Poem section. When we first discovered these pages I printed a few out and both my kids went on a writing spree. They loved creating all these crazy Acrostic poems and we have come back to them a few times since then and each time both kids just write and write. It is probably one of our favourite fun writing activities. And really you can find an Acrostic poem template for most themes on the site. (Here is a post I wrote out these poems – Having Fun Writing Poems)
Sticking with the writing idea we also have used the printable story paper a lot. It is really good when the kids are just writing sentences or paragraphs and I have found the pictures helps to get them going (in our house there is nothing less productive then giving our kids a blank piece of paper, they always do much better if they have a starting point of some sort).
And if you are working on characters have a look at the Story character pages. My son loved the Monster set and my daughter loved using the History set.
One set of pages that we use over and over again are the Continent Maps. Really I keep coming back to this section. We printed out the labelled maps to hang up and then the blank maps have been used for activities – I created labels and the kids pinned the labels onto the correct place, we did sessions where I called out countries and they had to colour them in, we have used them to plot rivers and mountains as we watch documentaries. And I know I am missing some stuff out. But if you want to do some Geography these maps are really useful.
Weather. We love the extreme weather section – especially the clozes. My son enjoys finding documentaries about extreme weather and then after we have finished watching the documentaries I tend to add in a few of these pages for him to complete.
And linked into the Weather section are the Water Cycle pages – everything you need if you are looking at the water cycle – we actually used some of the word cards to label a very large water cycle diagram that the kids created.
For animal/plant science have a look at the life cycle section. (Frog life cycle post)
If you search by type of animal (e.g. pet, African animal or Australian animal) you will also find a number of worksheets including word searches, vocabulary pages, how to draw pages, animal alphabet pages and a number of crafting templates. Oh I love the animal templates. That for me is just crafting happiness. You can use the templates for so many activities – a basic outline for drawing and then the kids add detail, a shape for collages, use the templates for paintings or for creating stick puppets. We use our templates so much that I tend to print ours out onto card so they last longer.
If you kids enjoy reading the Secret Seven or the Famous Five then you must look at the pages under these sections. A few years ago we went through a Secret Seven craze and I printed out a number of the pages and the kids had a blast. They created their own badges, wrote out club rules, created signs and actually ended up writing out a few of their own mini-stories.
Maths. There are a number of different Maths and Basic Number pages for younger kids have a look here – Maths Stages but I want to mention some other maths pages. Firstly for times tables we used the skip counting cards and the times table folding cards A LOT.
For telling time we like the different clocks that they have on the site.
But our favourite Maths pages are the ones that are more puzzly maths. Like the Pyramid puzzles or the mental maths gym pages. And don’t rule out using their art pages for maths – we used the grid copy pages to learn about co-ordinates.
Although not directly Maths as such the Sudoku pages are one of my favourites for logical thinking. We have done these so MANY times. I actually have a set printed out on the bookcase ready and waiting for an “I am bored session”. (Sudoku for Kids post)
And I cannot end without mentioning the Famous People section. We come back to this whenever we are learning about someone and I have found time and time again that you can use these pages with a number of different books – here are a few examples – Mary Anning, Guy Fawks and Christopher Columbus.
And I forgot to mention the Phases of the Moon pages. And I could go on and on but I am hoping that gives some of you a starting point with the Activity Village site.
PS. Don’t be scared to just type in few words into the search bar at the top.
ofamily learning together 