Tell Mega Bloks the ways you make learning fun for your children - £300 voucher to be won NOW CLOSED

[JustineBMumsnet]

There’s no doubt that your children think playing is great fun, but they might not always feel quite the same about learning. Mega Bloks would like to hear about the games you play with your children that might sneakily teach them things they’ll need to know in the future, or the techniques you’ve developed to make learning fun for your children.

Here’s what Mega Bloks have to say: “Every parent wants what’s best for their children. They want to build them up, and so do we at Mega Bloks. The block scooping wagon helps your DC reach important physical milestones, such as developing balance, co-ordination and motor skills. In stacking tall towers, children learn to develop their creativity. In telling stories with characters, they’re exploring their imaginations. And in building make-believe worlds where they can be the hero, they’re also building up the confidence to be anything!”

See the Mega Bloks block scooping wagon in action below:

So, whether you pretend to be at the supermarket and teach them how to count change or get them to learn about road signs while playing with cars, share your ways of getting your child to enjoy learning, or to make playing educational for their future.

All those who post a comment below will be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £300 Toys R Us voucher.

Thanks, and good luck with the prize draw!

MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs Apply

I bought a Melissa & Doug see and spell jigsaw toy for DD so she can use wooden letters to make words. She absolutely loves it and will often ask me to sit down and sound out the letters with her as she builds the words.

I use Lego to make lesson fun, here are some of the fun things we've done:
we've made scales out of lego and then measured how many lego bricks different items are, we make little lego scenes and act out stories before writing them up, my son has the lego-movie app and creates his own films.
When my son was struggling with measurements we made a lego tower that was taller than daddy!

Role play is so important and is a fun way to learn. I loved listening to DD playing school with all her dolls.

We do so much in the bath! Learning number songs, playing with foam numbers, recognising them, ordering them, adding together. We also have the dreaded bath paints which are a pain in the arse to clean up but are great for pre writing shapes and name writing, phoneme recognition etc.

My 3 yr old loves to count and learn, she loves interactive learning apps which are fun. She also loves these fun children's magazines, especially the ones with stickers that you have to put on certain places. As long as she's having fun she's happy to learn & she usually does have fun learning

learning through play, let their imagination run wild and read to them every day

Ds has a words tin from school with cut up words in it. Just going through them one by one was a nightmare (DS is ASD so all homework usually means a meltdown) so we made it into a game where we turn over the words and he says one and we then have to look for it. Ds then has to say each word turned over to see if it is the one he is looking for. He will happily play this game for half an hour and go over all his words several times. Yet going through them one by one would take 2 mins but 45 min meltdown!

I let my children lead the theme of play. They love building bricks that come to me as pizza or a flowery garden! You never know what will be next and I enjoy playing along. I have a 3 yr old and a 4 yr old so their imagination is encouraged a lot by having a playmate.
They also love cars, recreating traffic jams and now pretending to be super heroes too... the fun never ends with little minds and I'm happy to play along!

I turn everything into a song - he loves it! Its like a musical in my house x

Anything through play.
Use pinterest

Simple ones like cooking for motor skills maths time weight measurement quantity doubling etc

You have to strike a balance between sitting back and letting them explore and joining in and talking about what they are doing.

We did the school spelling test practise in the bath with foam letters for the first couple of years, he is great at spelling 😊

DS likes teaching DH and I how to do whatever new things he's learning to do and this really seems to help him get better at what he's learning as well as making us laugh a lot.

He first shows us what to do, then gives us anything we need to use and celebrates by waving his arms in the air when we get it right. He's still young so this week he's taught DH how to stack blocks and me how to do Pat-a-cake and to put his spoon back in the bowl properly after he's picked it up and eaten a mouthful of porridge (it tickles me that he thinks I need to learn to put his spoon down properly, rather than my own). As he gets older, I want to encourage him to keep doing this as I think teaching someone else is a great way to reinforce what he's learnt.

My little boy absolutely loves Thomas the Tank Engine.. Good old Thomas has helped my son enormously in;

• Learning colours - ('Can you tell me the names of all the green trains?)
• Learning numbers ('which train is number 7?')
• Recognising shapes & sizes ('Which train is the smallest?')
• Alphabet/spelling ('How many train names begin with S?) I've been amazed at how quickly my LO could tell the difference between the different trains, even when they were all the same colour - he would know by the size or shape of the engine - all these tiny details which completely passed me by! Thomas has been an amazing learning tool for us! I've even grown quite fond of him myself now! :)

We play lots of games to learn, my eldest learned to count by playing hide and seek

My five year old loves singing so when she's trying to remember sequences of things, whether it's days of the week or five times tables, we sing them together and sometimes we make up our own little songs and rhymes as a way to have fun whilst remembering. She never likes getting out of bed and going to school on a Monday but our Monday is funday rhyme really helps!

We try to make it part of everything so that she doesn't notice she's learning. Counting stairs on the way to bed, counting toys as we put them in the bath, drawing names of things we've built in the sand at the beach, etc.

our DCs learnt best through play and games and being outdoors.

On longer car journeys we play eye-spy type games but i change it to eg. find something blue to make it more age appropriate for my younger ones.

just by bringing it into everyday life....let them count and pay money at the shop, playing games in the car...name five flowers/colours/animals/trees..which is a firm family favourite!

Using proper words from when they're tiny, not 'baby-speak' and using lots of interesting vocabulary, explaining as you go, really helps to build good language skills without them realising they're learning. Also using lots of counting and numbers in everyday activities, encouraging them to work out how much they still need of something or how much is left, builds confidence in number work.

Make learning into games - so they don't think they are learning!

Spend time with them & engage. Let them lead you on a learning adventure by giving them space to be what they are / want to be and to spend time doing what they want to be without the weight of expectation. Enjoyment is easy when you can just enjoy.

Using pizzas helped division, singing along to times tables cds definitely worked and just generally counting everything in a competitive way helped number skills.

For writing we used the whiteboard a lot with different coloured pens. Encourages experimentation and can easily be wiped away if it's wrong. DD loves signing, so learning the alphabet was done that way. For maths, which she finds more difficult, we sing and use props- counting beads and objects. We also learn in the kitchen, weighing objects etc.