Five Minute Mum: Time For School: Easy, fun five-minute games to support Reception and Key Stage 1 children through their first years at school

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Time for Home School: Maths is THE book you need if you're home-schooling, from former teaching assistant, bestselling author and social media superstar Daisy Upton AKA Five Minute Mum. So what do you do? Here’s what you do. You set up the activity while they are busy/asleep/out and then when ready you START TO PLAY YOURSELF. And when they approach you say casually, “Do you want to try/play too?” and once you’ve got their interest you start to explain what to do.

Then after that, we often run around the house looking for something that has the SOUND that letter makes in it…I will often help and prompt by saying things like “I can see something with a h in it, am I looking at the hat, or the car?” and let them see if they can hear the H sound in the word hat. The sound doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the word. So for example if your letter of the day is X you might want to use box as the thing you find. After you’ve found an object, see if they want to draw it on the paper or post-its.Nursery doesn’t start with ABC (ay, bee, see) anymore, instead they teach the SOUNDS the letters makes. Which is all Phonics means (phon means sound) because this makes it easier for children to ‘blend’ the sounds/letters together to make a word and therefore read. So instead of saying ‘Suh’ or ‘ess’ for S, they learn ‘sssssss’ (hiss like a snake sound) so when your child reads the word ‘sit’ they sound out ‘sssssss-i-t’ as opposed to ‘suh-i-t’ which would be ‘suhit’ - no such word (no shuit!). I used the example of MOP on my videos. Saying an ‘M’ is a ‘muh’ and ‘P’ is a ‘Per’ means when the children see the letters MOP they would say ‘muopa’ - again, no such word. So the sound for M is ‘mmmm’ and the sound for P is a very short soft P(uh) with the emphasis on the P. Always let the kids come to you. Try not to clap your hands and say “OK kids we are going to do this activity now.” Even in your best ‘Meryl Streep THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME acting voice’, they KNOW. They just KNOW. In their little heads they go…”Yep, you’re trying to teach me something. I’m not having it Mum. Sod off. This bit of card that’s been on the floor for three days has suddenly taken my interest.” At the moment Ewan (age 4.5) is great with his letters. He’s grasped all of his Phase 2 Phonics sounds pretty well. But when it comes to blending them together to form a word he’s not up for it. He finds it hard and therefore it’s a turn off. So I need some games to make this element of reading a bit more fun. Tie string from somewhere high to somewhere low. I tied it to an upstairs window and to our slide in the garden below.

Unfold the letters and form your silly word. It’s more likely than not going to make a word that isn’t real ZOK, KAM, DOV, PUM etc. That’s OK. I explain why below* Mix up the letters in the big bowl saying “Silly soup, silly soup, we’re going to make some silly soup”

Find a place to display your letter of the day every day. Fridge? Radiator? A Door? somewhere they can see if regularly and access it from their height. We are skipping at a frightening pace towards my eldest starting school now. The summer holidays are here, and parents with older children are wondering what to do with six weeks at home entertaining their kids while I try to soak up every second of my wee man before classroom antics turn him into a 12 year old in a heartbeat. Next year I will be that Mum…but for now, it is school that is on my mind this summer and one question; IS HE READY? An exclusive first look at Five Minute Mum: Time for School with the Maths chapter. It may not clear all those home school headaches, but it will make life easier- and a bit more fun too! Lay out 5 pots, each with a potion ingredient in. One with the bicarbonate of soda, one with the vinegar, I also then had - one with coloured water, one with water beads, one with lemon juice. But you can use whatever you like. First of all you could try showing them how to write the letter onto the paper or post-its, both capital and lower case and see if they want to copy and have a try too.