We bought Valence on a whim. My son really enjoys board games and especially card games, so it seemed worth a try. Within just a few rounds, he was hooked. The main idea of the game is fairly simple, although there are a few fiddly rules to make it interesting. We played without them for…
Author: Deb Swinney
Helping mums overcome maths anxiety for themselves and for their kids.
The Big Life Journal
The Big Life Journal is all about helping your child to develop a growth mindset. For my own child, who attended school for a few years before we moved to home education, there was a legacy of perfectionism and fear of failure left over that we needed to tackle as a family. The Big Life…
National Trails (England and Wales)
The National Trails website is a site covering the 16 national managed trails across England and Wales. It contains route maps, pictures and guides. The trails include the England Coast Path. The site is glossy, colourful and beautiful, and there is a shop where you can buy official guides and maps. It has links to…
British Museum – Resource Packs
UK home educators will almost certainly have heard of the British Museum. It’s one of the most famous of the London museums, although it’s outside the main Kensington museum area, being in Bloomsbury instead. The British Museum collections are, in many cases, historic artefacts collected during the time of the British Empire, and so there…
V&A Museum – Resource Packs
UK home educators will probably know about the V&A Museum. It’s in the Kensington museum district of London, and focuses on art and design – fashion, ceramics, culture and much more. The V&A generally has an Art & Design orientation, and the website tends to advertise the current exhibitions and displays rather than being easy…
English Heritage – Find Sites By Period
If you live in the UK, you’ll most likely be familiar with English Heritage. Along with the National Trust, they’re one of the two well-known organisations that manage many of England’s historic sites and buildings. What you may not know is that the English Heritage website lets you search their sites by historical period. That’s…
Usborne Write and Draw Your Own Comics
My son is a rather reluctant writer. I’ve tried lots of things to get him writing, from picking topics he’s interested in, to story-telling dice, with little success. (Actually, he likes the story-telling dice, but only to narrate stories rather than write them down). This book was a great success, and got him telling a…
GoZen – Anxiety and Social-Emotional Learning
I saw this in a Home Education group, and signed up only half-hopeful that it would be suitable for us. After a while using it, I have to say that I love it! It’s not the cheapest, but there are some groups around who have group purchases set up which can reduce the price substantially….
Human Resource Machine (no, it’s good – really)
So, bear with me. This may not sound exciting. But it is. Tomorrow Corporation, who make this game, also made Little Inferno. If you haven’t come across that, it’s a fun, quirky, apparently-pointless-but-addictive game where you get to burn things in a fireplace. There’s a little more to it than that – a story, for…
BBC BiteSize
BBC BiteSize: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education BBC BiteSize has small, useful clips and info about curriculum topics. There’s quite wide coverage, but the clips are quite short. This is a useful top-up to other learning, not an education programme by itself. Also, some of the clips can feel a little patronizing. But overall, this has great visualisation tools to…
TableTop
WARNING: Not all episodes suitable for children, watch them first!!! Link: http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/ TableTop is a web series about board games. It does include some bad language, but it’s mostly bleeped. The series includes ‘TableTop After Dark’ episodes which are very much *not* suitable for children, including games like Cards Against Humanity. So watch first, before showing…
Minecraft GamED Academy
GamED Academy: http://gamedacademy.com/ I can’t recommend this one because we haven’t tried it yet, but I’m intrigued. The idea is that the lessons are all in Minecraft. Kids watch, learn, and build as part of their learning process. There are curricula for maths, history, science and other stuff too. I’m not sure how this will work…
Home Ed Resources 