Welcome to the start of the school year for 2024. We are going to have an amazing year together as I am now teaching just three days per week. This means I have two days plus weekends to dedicate to making Learn From Play the ultimate resource for you and your learners.
With your success top of mind, I wanted to revisit the Learn From Play mission statement and explain how this cross curricular website can support you to:
Get children active while learning;
Allow every child to learn at their optimum level; and
Provide unique resources which are fun for learners and easy for educators.
I will discuss our offerings in brief first and go into the teaching philosophy behind each a little later in this blog.
So firstly, our flagship offering on Learn From Play is hundreds of picture books and short story activities. Allowing children to engage with text beyond just reading a story, these activities are all original and we love creating them for you.
For primary school Mathematics, we offer fun, physically active maths activities with our exclusive program Maths ‘N’ Movement.
Bloomsmath provides even more enrichment for K-6 learners with differentiated maths activities based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s original and exclusive to Learn From Play and used in schools around the globe!
I love putting up posters to brighten my school library so my team and I have created original artworks with inspirational quotes. Learn From Play members can print these off as high resolution posters to both decorate your learning space and empower your children.
And to help take the stress out of book week 2024 we have created twenty-one costume concepts suitable for students and teachers searching for simple Book Week costumes.
Phew, so that’s quite a list of offerings. I would love you to stick with me a little longer while I share with you my philosophy for creating these resources and how I envisage you might best use each resource with your children.
Activity Sheets and Games
Children read at different speeds and absorb information from books in different ways. So to extend the fun of reading, and the absorption of key concepts, we create sets of book activities. Each book set complements the reading of the story by exploring the book’s themes and messages. So far, we have created more than 2000 activities and to make it easier to search for a book activity for your learners, we upgraded our website search function in 2023 so you can now search by book title, author, illustrator, activity grade level, curriculum learning area, activity type or keyword.
Every activity has a clear learning objective to make programming easy and to ensure children are covering a range of outcomes. The print-on-demand worksheets ensure students are practising fine motor skills with cutting and pasting, colouring, writing, matching and drawing activities. The wide range of activities allow learners to develop hand-eye coordination and tool manipulation as early as possible.
Each book also has three digital games – a memory card game to promote short term information retention and observation skills, a maze to develop critical thinking skills and a puzzle to encourage problem solving. These digital resources are designed as a fun extra activity for children once they have finished the sheets or, if you like, you can use them to introduce a new book! The memory game cards and book cover puzzle can be used to allow learners to develop prediction skills about the story’s possible characters, themes and storyline. If you are using the activities I created in a different way, I would love to hear your tips so that I might share them.
While craft develops creative thinking, physical games allow children to develop their cooperation and communication skills. So in 2023, I revisited every one of the three hundred plus sets of book activities so that they now all include a physically active game or a craft activity. Did you spot one I missed? Please do let me know!
To see for yourself how much your children can learn from each book they read click here to find a set of activities that is perfect for you or explore the activities we have created for National Simultaneous Storytime on May 22nd.