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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.

Three tips to help your child with maths

Maths addition number sentences on the blackboard
Giving your child too much help with their maths work can be detrimental to their learning, but it’s still good to show your support. Read on for top tips and techniques to get your child learning maths independently.

Many parents offer their children support with homework but in doing so often end up just doing it for them. Instead it’s important to think about how you can motivate children so that they willingly solve the problems for themselves, and what level of assistance will actually maximise their learning.

1. Don’t take over

Usually children will only ask for assistance when they are stuck. Often it seems easier to just do the problem for them, but this certainly doesn't help them to learn anything.  Next time you have a plea for help, try asking a question such as, “What do you know?” or “What are you trying to find out?” and “What have you done so far?” Quite often actually talking through the problem will provide a prompt for moving forward.

2. Motivate your child

We all know there are many other more enjoyable pastimes for our children than homework that prove an easy distraction. So it’s a good idea to involve children in as many family activities as possible that promote number skills and are enjoyable, too. Easily available ones are dominoes and family card games that involve scoring points in different ways. These enhance children's learning in basic arithmetic and develop important aspects of mathematical thinking, such as working out strategies and reasoning.

3. Try different activities

There are numerous books that have exercises you and your child can do together. However, kids are not always keen to work from books as it can feel very similar to what they’ve been doing at school. So they may find a web-based approach more interesting. An excellent website for maths exercises is NRICH, which covers all key stages from 1 to 6 with interactive problems, games and articles.  The answers are included as well as hints, so parents don’t need to worry if they’re a bit rusty themselves!