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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

Best Christmas learning websites for children

Best Christmas learning websites for children
Harness the pre-Christmas excitement with some festive online learning, from coding games starring Santa's elves to themed science experiments, seasonal stories and gingerbread counting interactives. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas (learning fun)...

Best for coding fun: Google Santa Tracker

The Google Santa Tracker offers educational activities for every age: learn to code with the elves in Code Lab and Code Boogie, find out how the world celebrates the season with quizzes, get creative with games like Snowbox, Elf Maker and Santa Selfie and read an interactive storybook about Ollie the Narwhal celebrating under the sea. It's all free, beautifully designed and great fun.

Best for Christmas maths: Topmarks

From decorating virtual jumpers and sequencing festive patterns to finding mirror symmetry in Christmas images, the Topmarks interactive Christmas games will offer your child the chance to practise their counting, matching and ordering skills the December way! All the games are free, colourful and easy to play on a tablet or desktop computer.

Best for Christmas science activities: Santa’s STEM workshop from the IET

 

The Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Santa’s STEM workshop is packed with festive-themed engineering and technology activities for kids aged 4 to 13.

Why not do some festive baking with marshmallow snowballs, do some electric dough experiments, make your own Christmas cracker, create a snow globe or design a super sleigh? Or why not try your hand at insulating Santa's packed lunch, making Rudolph's nose light up or producing a basket to store presents? Detailed instructions are provided for each activity.

Best for Christmas stories: Storynory

Storynory is the largest archive of free children’s audiobooks online and there are loads of festive tales to listen to, from the classic poem The Night Before Christmas to A Christmas Carol (retold for children as a mini-play) and Storynory exclusive Christmas stories. There are more 600 audio stories on the site – hours of free entertainment if your child enjoys curling up and listening to a beautifully told tale.

Best for Christmas wordplay: Woo! Jr. Kids Activities

A brilliant set of Christmas fill in the blank stories (or word puzzle ad libs) to help get everyone in the festive spirit. How silly, original or contradictory can you be in your word choices? Which family member can come up with the most bizarre stories? Fill-the-blank word puzzles are a great way to boost your child's vocabulary and understanding of the different parts of speech. Free to download and print.

Best for printable worksheets: TheSchoolRun festive fun learning packs

Packed with presents, elves, reindeer, snow and Santa, TheSchoolRun's Festive fun activities for KS1 and Festive fun activities for KS2 will keep kids busy and learning over the Christmas break. For Y1 and Y2 there are letters to Santa to write, presents to count and a Christmas model village to build. Older kids have present-delivery schedules to work out, Grotto problems to solve and light and dark experiments to try.

If you are a TheSchoolRun subscriber the packs are free to download as part of your subscription, but they can also be purchased for £3.95 each in TheSchoolRun Bookshop.