AD
The children have returned to school and a sense of normality has resumed. You may have discovered that you’re not a natural when it came to teaching your kids at home. Don’t let that stop you trying to help them at home though! Learning Resources have a huge range of educational games that are so fun, your child won’t even notice they’re learning!
Fun Educational Games for Primary School Kids
We were sent a lovely games bundle aimed at primary school-age children to help us get back into the swing of things.
After having a long break from school, kids can often claim to have forgotten everything. To be fair to them, they easily could have! I forget stuff all the time, and I imagine several weeks away from structured learning to make you feel a bit out of it. That’s why it’s so important to support their learning at home if you can.
While asking to hear Greg read often receives a groan and a moan of “I don’t want to, I’m tired.” He’s more than happy to play a game and the ‘exhaustion’ vanishes! He’s currently very keen on every single one of these games, and I am too. They’re loads of fun and reinforce what he learns in the classroom without him even noticing!
Here’s what we got and I genuinely recommend every single one of them. You can buy them all directly form Learning Resources.
Sum Swamp
This clever board game gets the kids practising their adding and subtracting in a fun setting. Greg is currently obsessed with it and asks us to play several times a day. The aim is to get from the start to the finish, as with all board games.
The game allows up to four players and contains three dice which which make up the sums. Sum Swamp is for age 5+, Greg is five and has just started year one so we play the basic rules for him.
The basic rules involve rolling the dice and making a number sentence in the format of the largest number first, the plus or minus die in the middle and the lower number second.
This way of playing eliminates the chances of ending up with a negative result. If you’re playing with older children, who understand negative numbers then you can play as the dice land and spice things up a little.
The board itself has other instructions that give you bonus goes if you land on them and increase your chances of winning. Greg does everybody’s sums, which gives him even more practise at memorising his number bonds.
Mathlink Cubes – Early Maths Starter Set
Chances are, your child will have seen cubes like this at school or nursery already. This is the early maths set, so perfect for Greg’s age group. The set contains the colourful cubes, but also activity cards to accompany them.
We have been setting Greg challenges with the cubes to make it fun. He enjoys copying the patterns on the cards and even the adding and subtracting (they’re a particularly good visual aid for when you run out of fingers).
These are very versatile little cubes as they can support learning for early arithmetic, sequencing, sorting and grouping, size and colour recognition, measurement and ordering. The set comes with loads of challenges to complete, so once you’ve got through them all, just start again form the beginning!
Tackling Tables
Schools encourage times tables to be learned by heart which takes a lot of practice. This card game reinforces tables while adding an element of fun and competition.
The cards are designed in such a way that any element can be concealed with a thumb to hide the answer. You can cover the middle number or the top or bottom number to create a challenge but hide the solution.
The way the game is played is really clever. The quizmaster (parent) asks the child the question and if they answer within 3 seconds, the child wins the card. If they don’t, the quizmaster keeps it. This method shows the parent which questions from the times table need a bit of extra help memorising. The ideal result is that the child wins every time!
The cards are colour coded to denote what stage that particular table is, red being the most advanced. So far the cards are definitely helping in a fun and challenging way.
Sight Word Swat
Sight Word Swat is another great game for reinforcing the learning of things that should be memorised. It features 300 high frequency words from phases 2-6 of the government’s phonics framework.
The game allows up to 4 players and needs someone to call out words. The players then search among the flies for what was shouted out and the first one to swat the correct fly wins it. The persons who wins the most flies wins the game.
It’s great for reinforcing what the kids have learnt in school and it’ll take them experts in reading even the tricky words!
All of these games are perfect support for kids returning to school without making the child feel like the pressure is on. They keep learning fun and lighthearted and provide support for reading, maths and language. They’re very handy for helping children brush up after being out of the learning environment for a while too. My children were away from school for 6 months when the lockdown was on and Greg was in definite need of a refresher!
All games are also available from Amazon – affiliate links below.
You might also like: