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Crossbow Catalogue Suggestions for Home Schooling
Shelley Johnston is a home educator and has tried and tested many of the crossbow products for using to home educate. Below are her top picks from our catalogue. To read more about Shelley click here. Or to see some of her tips and ideas for home education click here.
Playing with Words Kit:
Need to cook tea, but feeling guilty that you haven’t done any “literacy stuff” with the younger ones? Give one of these games to an older child and get them to play it with a smaller sibling-result! Ok, realistically that only works one time in 3, but the point is that these are games with content which is all covered by Y2, but they have decent playing value. They are actually fun because were mostly designed by Bob to coax recalcitrant teenagers into reading and nobody fools a stroppy fifteen year old by telling them that matching pairs is a “game”!
Telling the time is dead easy, right? I found it really hard to teach my children to tell the time because I couldn’t remember what it was like not to be able to do it. Also, half the clocks in my house have roman numerals and cause confusion or are too high for small ones to see. This kit helps to solve both problems.
A reprint of a game that used to have my sisters and I shrieking with laughter long past the age where we needed to practice sentence structure.
It is a new slant on the old game of Rummy: collect all the segments of the lobster to make a nonsense sentence. That’s easy - but then you have to keep it in your head while the other players try to put you off, and only if you repeat it from memory do you win the game
With the modern emphasis on grammar this game has come back into it’s own, as well as being an excellent memory exercise. I make no apologies for the amount of heckling that tends to occur…
Good old Montessori, had some fab ideas and sandpaper letters are one of them. These are the modern, convenient version in bright colours with a multi-surface sticky back. Trace them with fingers, do crayon rubbings with them, stick them on the fridge while you clean the kitchen and talk about the letter. Little ones are such hands on learners and things like this really help letters to sink in.
Sometime I am afraid I just can’t bear the boredom of sitting down to do reading practice with a boring book with 6 words in and a child who is not in the mood. So I like sight-words games A LOT! This one has the advantage of getting to bash stuff.
For slightly older children, encouragement and structured activities to build a style of writing which they can feel confident is worth reading.
With extracts from “the third tribe………
I am so not convinced by pushing matchsticks or pencils through bits of card to make spinners. This one will just work.
A simple but well-thought out game getting children to match up different parts of words and recognise patterns within words. It is based on the old playing card favourite “black jack with the added dubious pleasure of getting to play the “you lose!” card – my children tend to add that charming gesture made with the right thumb and forefinger on the forehead for added effect..
Fits in your nappy/hand bag. Blocks of ten beads in alternating colours so good for teaching children who are getting to grips with the jump from counting to twenty to counting to a hundred. Tactile and sturdy.
On a cd, ready for you to print when you need them. Various maths games and templates born of years of traipsing about the country doing workshops to encourage teachers to use more games in their teaching because, unsurprisingly, children learn better if they are having fun!