Best home curriculum or workbooks

[Fernandherbs]

My child is pretty bright and always on the go and while not any kind of genius, they are much easier to deal with when busy and they love learning so much. I’ve exhausted all the books school send home and tried those workbooks you get in supermarkets but it’s not enough!

I’m looking at curriculum based workbooks or targeted work I can do with them of an evening, as they’re so in love with the social side of school I can’t homeschool and just want to top it up/entertain them at home.

All I can find online is American and Christian schemes or SHL which seems very shady about actually showing you what you get. We’ve tried Twinkl but printing was costing a fortune and it’s a lot of the same stuff they’re doing in school anyway. Can anybody show me some good resources I could use? I’d be very grateful. Physical is preferred but anything online or an app would be good too, but we’ve already tried ABC Mouse, Reading Eggs and Night Zookeeper.

What sort of level is he/she at? e.g. is he/she old enough to appreciate online resources like Alcumus (for maths) or HackerRank (for computer programming) or general interest blogs like Astral Ten Codex?

Are there any particular subjects that you want to focus on?

Year 2, and about average for age so the basics really like maths and English. We do lots of other activities and play at home but they prefer the structured work like workbooks and stuff. Apps don’t go down as well as physical products, sadly as the printing was costing much more than a subscription would!

I liked these during lockdown
www.cgpbooks.co.uk/

There are some great American resources out there, so I wouldn't be put off by that. You just need to be aware of spelling differences and some grammatical differences (Oxford comma). Evan Moor have lots of fun resources and most can be bought as e-books that you can print out. Peace Hill Press take a very different approach to education but we loved their 'Story of the World'.

I was just about to say CGP are by far the best in my experience, but PP beat me to it!

We do CPG, I've also used The Reading Chest for extra books.

You can buy all the pupil workbooks for White Rose Maths for each national curriculum year if you want to, that covers the entire national curriculum for maths and has mini videos to explain each bit too if you want to "teach" it first. Check it isn't exactly the same worksheets your child will be doing in class first though - it might well be!

White rose maths work books and and online lessons are great! Can’t recommend enough.

We use CGP for English and have workbooks for phonics, spelling/grammar, reading comp and handwriting. Although it sounds a lot they’re just a couple of pages a day and you can get for each term, so you know you’re covering everything in the curriculum.

We use CGP discover and learn for science which again I’d recommend, really colourful and child friendly.

For history I use a DC child’s encyclopaedia and print off free bits from the internet/watch YouTube videos about whatever topic we’re doing that week. This isn’t really hitting the curriculum as it’s more to do with local history, family tress, what’s different now to when you and grandparents were children. we covered the history curriculum pretty quickly, a encyclopaedia is a great way to carry on discussing and learning about broader historical topics.

Geography we use Collins but I don’t rate them as highly as everything else. Plus at this age geography isn’t very in-depth, it would be easy to cover the curriculum with internet print offs.

We use the good and the beautiful in the evenings. We discovered in lockdown, we all loved it do much we decided to carry on!! The children would actually be disappointed to stop.
It is Christian and American, we are neither but not come across any issues with it so far. Any Christianity is very easy to skip over, unfortunately there are more Christian references at their regular (not church of England etc) school. Nativity, songs in assembly's etc. The curriculum is definitely to a lesser extent and we've managed to make it entirely secular.

We decided to concentrate on the languages and humanities. We tend to use Duolingo in order to teach the children to spell and say basic French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/German words primarily. I am now looking at tutors online as well who specialize in those languages too. You can do so much I have observed over the years.

In terms of math, I found some nice workbooks yesterday. I was at a bookshop and saw some on a shelf there. I even print off random resources from the Internet to do in science/history/geography lessons in addition. Mainly old exam papers. In geography, we rely on a world map and atlas mostly.

Art we experiment. I have shown them different kinds of art and we focus a lot on new arty techniques to try. We discuss artists and write a short piece on why we like their work and so on. I use a book called How to teach Art to Children, it helps somewhat to guide me. It helps to have a specially dedicated art and craft supply box and craft table on top of that.