Over my years of tutoring primary school children, it has become routine for me to arrive to lessons with my bag full of various objects other than paper worksheets! While students must develop the discipline to produce beautifully written stories and methodical workings out for maths problems, along the way, it is incredibly helpful to support with a range of concrete learning tools. Arranging these together in a "learning playbox" in a corner of your child's room can be an effective way of children developing a positive association with their learning and lesson time, knowing these props are there to support them. Here are some of my favourites that you may enjoy using at home:
Each dice has a range of visual prompts, from images of animals to characters to the weather. The children must roll the die, order them and improvise a story using the images. It's a great way of introducing children to storytelling as an introductory activity for more formal story-writing.
These are really useful to aid in KS1 multiplication sums, as a visual tool to demonstrate multiplication arrays and also useful in teaching the concept of area in KS1 and early KS2.
Paper money and clocks
It's always fun to create role play scenarios to help children gain familiarity with money. Using a set of fake money, you can engage children in shop and restaurant role plays. Similarly, using a paper or online clock is really helpful to aid children in telling the time. The process of making one's own clock really helps the child to embed the difference between the minute and hour hands.
This is a great tool for differentiating between odd and even numbers, place value, number bonds and to support addition, subtraction, multiplication and division sums.
Simple board games
A classic board game I use with children is Snakes & Ladders. I use English or Maths challenge cards in tandem and ask children to answer a card before they have their go, both taking turns. If the student catches on that the questions are too easy for the adult (!), I welcome them to ask me any question they are curious about, that I must answer successfully before I have my go. Recent questions I have been asked include...How did slavery begin? and What is a gladiator?... so the kids are definitely keeping me on my toes.
These are so compact and so helpful in doing simple addition and subtraction sums with young learners, as well as practising number bonds.
Noun, verb, adjective hat (storytelling)
To help children solidify their knowledge of various word types, I like to organise either a box, hat or container of some sort, with word cards, involving nouns, verbs, adjectives. You could also pop in prepositions and fronted adverbials (i.e. sentence openers). We then take turns to pick a word from the bag, identify the word type and create a sentence using that word. Each player tries to connect their sentence to the previous sentence created, so you are building up a story as you play!
These are just some tools and tricks I like to use in lessons currently; they add that dimension of tactile learning and play to lessons which is so important in keeping energy and engagement high.
written by Tutor, Jenny.
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