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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.

Learning English and maths outdoors

Child on a farm
The great outdoors is a place where learning can take diverse shapes and forms. We take a look at how you can use it to strengthen your child’s literacy and numeracy skills.

We often think that outdoor learning is synonymous with the school trip, but it needn’t be! As a parent you can use outdoor activities and trips to give your children physical examples and experiences to help them with their literacy and numeracy skills.

Children who may struggle with classroom-based learning often excel when learning in outdoor environments because it releases them from the pressures they may associate with school.

Outdoor learning can take place in massively diverse settings – whether it’s your back garden, your local park, a heritage site, or a farm, you will find there are many activities and games you can play with your kids to stimulate and extend their literacy and numeracy skills.

Outdoor learning and literacy

Try these fun activities to boost literacy skills:

1. Storytelling fun

When you’re outdoors ask your child to pick something they see to tell you a story about. It could be a tree that has stood for hundreds of years. What might it have seen?

2. What can you see, what can you spell?

Asking children to identify objects and species is a useful way of encouraging observations of their surroundings. See if your child knows the name of something you point at – if it is a tree, what type is it? Can they take a guess at how it is spelt? Perhaps they can start a nature book to record details of what they see outdoors.

3. Countryside rules!

As every parent well knows, all outdoor settings need to be treated with respect. Composing a set of rules for the setting, either jotted down into a notepad or just discussed can help children to think carefully about their surroundings while using appropriate language. Examples could be, ‘Don’t disturb nests’ or ‘Remember to shut gates’.

4. Character games

All children are natural actors, so asking them to become a character from the setting you are in shouldn’t be too hard! Your child could choose their favourite bird and find things in the surroundings that it might use to build its nest or things it might eat.

Outdoor learning and numeracy

Try these fun activities to boost numeracy skills:

1. A-mazing

Mazes are an excellent way of helping your child with numeracy. Exploring direction and logic, mazes extend children’s classroom numeracy skills in a fun and interactive setting. Ask your child to draw directions as they go and then test them out yourself!

2. Shape-spotting

The world around us contains so many different shapes. When out with your child, ask them what shapes they can see in buildings, trees, leaves and wildlife.

3. Survey skills

Try doing a survey! It could be on anything: cars, wildlife or trees. Your child could record the number of the items they see as pictures, tallies or as numbers, and even put their results in a graph.

4. Fun with seeds

Look at a variety of seeds and ask your child to point out similarities and differences between them, such as size, colour, shape and weight. Plant some seeds and make a chart, recording the size of the plant and ask your child how long they think it will take to grow to a certain height.