Buckets of Reasoning: NRich

I was looking for maths activities to go beyond mental maths skills and was referred to the Nrich website - a really cool 20-year strong website with really loads of material. Baby steps first, I went to Stage 1 & 2 and then from there Features > Reasoning > Identifying Opportunities (task) > Eggs in A Basket, where you'll find the notes for the delivery of the activity and the actual activity. Below is our (father+son) Sunday afternoon version of the activity (in Portuguese).

Sequence Snake: purplemash

Sequence snake is a nice and gentle sequence building game. Speed and difficulty grow at a sensible pace, going from sequences incrementing in 1s to larger increments. The speed has a great effect of training prompt responses.

 

Bond Bubbles - purplemash

This is Bond Bubbles, a very good adding game with added fun with snooker style strategy. The playtime is generous and keeps kids entertained for a good spell - while training their sums!

 

Telling the time 2: discovery

Following up from my earlier post on practising reading and telling the time, I enjoyed seeing how this other activity engages the player really well: it's a snap card game for units of time. It has a dealing speed slider to make the game more or less challenging. Just hover the mouse over the button at the centre to wait for the right card and then...snap it with  the space bar. At any time the help icon on the top left will show the instructions. I was amazed with the satisfaction the little ones get when the right card turns up.

Telling the time: discovery

I find learning to tell the time quite challenging on dial clocks and these activities give a good handle on how to do it.  I personally like the one in 'Match the times', reading clocks in quarter-of-hour intervals.

Phonics mash

Notes for parents supporting phonics work - so, where to start from to help? I found this a good video in 'teacher tips' at discovery espresso. It's about different sounds for the same letters, like in regional differences in pronunciation.

Purplemash: pirates+

Looking up the purplemash website upon suggestion from Miss Kirkby I found this very interesting: the island editor and some videos with a ‘pirate’ describing the proposed activities. However, as I was tutoring Liam, I realised he really wanted to use the car games available and that was a good move. I now would suggest going to purplemash > games and playing A-fish-metic and Maths city 1. The first had a nice counting challenge whereas the latter allowed playing with time, distances and velocities by choosing car speeds.

Soon to come: LOGO https://www.purplemash.com/#app/tools/logo