Need some advice re. emigrating

[singarainbow]

Hi, We are emigrating to Australia in April, where we will be in temp holiday accomodation for two months until I find a job. Once I have found work we will get a more permanent rental and know which area we are living in, and put our 2 kids (5 & 8) into the local school. Can anyone please advise me about a few good portable resources (i.e workbooks, websites) that I can use with the kids during the time they will have out of school?
Thanks

As it's only a few months you probably don't need much in terms of resources. The BBC bitesize website is excellent, they have a primary school section which includes video clips on lot of things. Also the CBeebies site has lots if educational games for little ones. This website Primary Resources have loads of free printable worksheets.

Perhaps you should download the Australian Curriculum and have look at what they are covering at your children's stages in advance?

As for books, I would go with CGP which are colourful, funny so don't feel workbooky and easy to use (and relatively cheap) and cover everything they're likely to encounter in the curriculum down under. You could try the Bond workbooks for math if they need help in that area.

But you don't really need to do any of that if you don't want to, as the children will probably be learning loads through emigrating into a new culture anyway, and a few months doing their own thing won't prevent them settling in really well - but that's just my opinion, leave it if you like!

I'd probably just investigate what major differences there are in schools and help them to brush up on that (eg. for the US I'd brush up on their US history). Take them to lots of museums etc. so get a feel for life down under; and do lots of reading and keep up with simple Maths. I might try to get them some swimming lessons, but that's probably just my preconceived ideas about Australian's.

I has to teach my five year old what shade was when we emigrated....

Our school used Mathletics and Reading Eggs/eggspress on the Internet.

When you get here, go to the bookshop and you should find workbooks for the state you are living in. The two stAtes that I have lived in, NSW and Victoria have had their own handwriting schemes so you could look that up and download them.