Back to School with Parragon Books
Like most parents I’ve been thinking up ways to keep the kids busy this summer holiday.
For us that means days out to the park, farm and to meet friends. When the weather isn’t great though, I find it a bit trickier to think up things to entertain the girls.
Of course, I don’t keep them busy all the time. I think it’s good to let them get bored and leave them to it at times so that they can think up their own forms of entertainment.
I love watching them coming up with games to play and the majority of the time the theme of their games is school.
One will be pretend to be the teacher, whilst the other is the pupil. It’s very cute to watch!
During the summer holidays I’ve been more focused on the girls learning than in previous years. In particular we’ve been practicing their reading and letter recognition.
With the return of school just a few weeks away, we’ve been making the most of the wonderful books available from Parragon Books.
We were sent two of their Gold Stars workbooks: Writing and Maths, as well as a super cool Factivity World Explorer Set and a Factivity Missions in Space book.
The first thing the girls wanted to do was look at the World Explorer set. Their sister has recently flown out to Ghana with her University as she’s training to be a nurse so the girls wanted to see where Ghana was on the map.
Inside the box there’s a double sided world map, some stickers which can be used on the map, a compass and a book.
After showing the girls where we lived on the map, we then found Ghana and used our fingers to draw a trail from the UK to Ghana.
The book that comes with this set is full of interesting facts and information about different places in the world, including the Oceans.
One of the girls favourite things to do was sticking the landmark stickers on the map. Whilst doing this we talked about the names of the landmarks, what they are and where they are.
The girls also enjoyed using the flag stickers to match the flag to the right country before sticking them onto the map as well.
We spent almost two hours playing with this set, and still have lots of flags left to stick on as well as some other stickers.
There’s also a handy page in the book which talks about how to use the compass. The girls loved the compass so I set them tasks such as finding where north is etc.
Overall, this is a wonderful set to help children learn more about the world around them in a fun and interactive way.
Next up we have the Big Workbook Maths. This is for children aged 5-7. Our twins are five years old.
There are lots of activities throughout this book from counting, number lines and filling in missing lines to addition, taking away and fractions.
Our girls love doing these books especially when they know they can stick a gold star on the page when they’ve completed it!
The wipe-clean writing book has been a big hit in our house as well. I also like these books because it means I only need to buy one as the girls can share it. When one has completed it, you can simply wipe the page clean and the other can then have a go too.
Like the Maths book, the writing book is full of different activities to help children with pencil control, matching and of course writing.
I’ve always liked the Gold Star books from Parragon Books. I think they’re great value for money and they really do make a difference in helping children to learn.
Next up we have the Factivity Missions in Space book. This book has 60 flaps for children to find and discover the facts!
Each page is easy to read and full of useful and fun facts.
This cool ‘Lift-Off’ page has flaps all up the length of the rocket!
Children can learn about the moon landings and look at the pictures which have more fun facts on, as well as more flaps to lift.
The Astronaut Training page was our favourite!
Thank you Parragon Books for sending us these back to school books.
For the purpose of this review we were sent the above books. All views and opinions are 100% my own.
