I genuinely believe that a school can only do so much to teach our children – the rest of it is up to us, as parents.
We have the opportunity to take what our children are learning at school and run with it – making it as interesting as possible for them at the same time.
For example, at the moment Master Frugal is learning about the First World War and he is enjoying it more than any topic he has covered before at school. He loves to tell us about what he’s learned that day and has lots of random facts about the war stored in his head already.
While he is at that stage and is genuinely hungry for more knowledge on the subject, we’ve swapped his usual reading book for the Horrible Histories book about the First World War and we’ve had a look at a few YouTube videos on the subject (screened first by us) to try and bring it to life a little bit more for him.
We also heard about an exhibit at our local museum so he went along with his Dad to learn even more.
Another thing we know he’s going to be learning about are ‘Living things and their habitats’ which is another subject that he’s really interested in.
They haven’t started this yet but we’ve been told it’s on the learning plan for the class so we’ve started our own learning at home by watching some of the fantastic David Attenborough documentaries that are showing on Netflix currently.
While we were searching for documentaries to watch, we also found a fab show called Sacred Planet which is a Disney documentary that is well worth a watch. Mast F was fascinated by it as it even though it’s not directly linked to what he’ll be learning about. Shows like this broaden a child’s understanding of the world and actually, it made me think as well.
Disclosure: Although we’ve had Netflix for several years, we have recently been asked to be part of their #StreamTeam to share our love of Netflix with you. I received an Ipad mini as a welcome to the #StreamTeam but this doesn’t infuence my opinion in any way – we love Netflix as much as we did before.