Toys & Games To Help With Going Back To School

Do you know Lamb started school this week?! Oh of course you do, I’ve mentioned it a million times already… *sad face*

I’ve read a few articles and threads online about 4 being too young to start school. If I’m honest it’s not been a worry for us. Lamb won’t be the oldest in the class as he’s a March baby, but we believe he’s ready. And I think this is down to being a pre-school 2 days a week from 9am until 5pm. As well as us introducing puzzles and games from a young age.

We’ve always loved educational games. We buy a lot of Orchard Toys games which are great for learning. We also do activity books that are aimed for getting ready for school.

The closer he gets to being in school full time, the more I want to help at home and encourage him to learn and develop to the best of his ability.

There are lots of toys and games you can buy that will help prepare your child for starting or going back to school. I’ve found a few which I really like the look of.

First up is this Pretend & Play Original School Set.  This role play toy will be a great way of teaching a child starting school all about what their day may be like. From telling the time to letters and numbers. It will be a fun way of easing them into the school day.

I remember using thinks like these fraction tower cubes at school and they were so good at helping us understand how fractions work, as well as simple counting. If your child is too young for fractions you could still use them fro adding and subtracting, and dividing into colour groups etc.

As I mentioned, We love Orchard Toys games. There are so many suitable for ‘back to school’ style learning but I’ll just pick out a couple to share with you.

Magic Maths is a KS1 maths game suitable for ages 5-7 years. We would buy this for Lamb even though he’s not 5 yet because he’s really good at listening to instructions and figures out the rules pretty quickly. You could call him a bit of a geek! He’s much better with games and puzzles the he is with arts & crafts.

Another good option for education play is What’s The Time Mr Wolf. I have no idea when we will teach Lamb to tell the time but if we can kick start things with a game then this will be the one to do it. 

Something we’re keen to teach Lamb is money and it’s different values. At the moment he counts coins individually. He might have 10 coins in front of him, so he thinks he has 10 ‘pennies’. Playing a game like Little Banker will make learning values fun.

Lamb loves doing jigsaw puzzles so we’ve used this to our advantage by getting him to play with educational puzzles. Ones like this Alphabet Puzzle are great for teaching letters as well as recognising different objects or pictures.

This summer we bought Lamb some learning workbooks from Aldi. Luckily he’s a bit of a geek like his mum and loves completing the tasks. They are for ages 3-5 and 4-5 so perfect for him now and he really seems to grasp what he’s doing. One of them even has gold stars to stick on the pages when he’s completed them.

I’d love to know what toys and games your little ones have to help prepare them for school?

~A~

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