Welcome to the start of the school year for 2024. We are going to have an amazing year together as I am now teaching just three days per week. This means I have two days plus weekends to dedicate to making Learn From Play the ultimate resource for you and your learners.
With your success top of mind, I wanted to revisit the Learn From Play mission statement and explain how this cross curricular website can support you to:
Get children active while learning;
Allow every child to learn at their optimum level; and
Provide unique resources which are fun for learners and easy for educators.
I will discuss our offerings in brief first and go into the teaching philosophy behind each a little later in this blog.
So firstly, our flagship offering on Learn From Play is hundreds of picture books and short story activities. Allowing children to engage with text beyond just reading a story, these activities are all original and we love creating them for you.
For primary school Mathematics, we offer fun, physically active maths activities with our exclusive program Maths ‘N’ Movement.
Bloomsmath provides even more enrichment for K-6 learners with differentiated maths activities based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s original and exclusive to Learn From Play and used in schools around the globe!
I love putting up posters to brighten my school library so my team and I have created original artworks with inspirational quotes. Learn From Play members can print these off as high resolution posters to both decorate your learning space and empower your children.
And to help take the stress out of book week 2024 we have created twenty-one costume concepts suitable for students and teachers searching for simple Book Week costumes.
Phew, so that’s quite a list of offerings. I would love you to stick with me a little longer while I share with you my philosophy for creating these resources and how I envisage you might best use each resource with your children.
Activity Sheets and Games
Children read at different speeds and absorb information from books in different ways. So to extend the fun of reading, and the absorption of key concepts, we create sets of book activities. Each book set complements the reading of the story by exploring the book’s themes and messages. So far, we have created more than 2000 activities and to make it easier to search for a book activity for your learners, we upgraded our website search function in 2023 so you can now search by book title, author, illustrator, activity grade level, curriculum learning area, activity type or keyword.
Every activity has a clear learning objective to make programming easy and to ensure children are covering a range of outcomes. The print-on-demand worksheets ensure students are practising fine motor skills with cutting and pasting, colouring, writing, matching and drawing activities. The wide range of activities allow learners to develop hand-eye coordination and tool manipulation as early as possible.
Each book also has three digital games – a memory card game to promote short term information retention and observation skills, a maze to develop critical thinking skills and a puzzle to encourage problem solving. These digital resources are designed as a fun extra activity for children once they have finished the sheets or, if you like, you can use them to introduce a new book! The memory game cards and book cover puzzle can be used to allow learners to develop prediction skills about the story’s possible characters, themes and storyline. If you are using the activities I created in a different way, I would love to hear your tips so that I might share them.
While craft develops creative thinking, physical games allow children to develop their cooperation and communication skills. So in 2023, I revisited every one of the three hundred plus sets of book activities so that they now all include a physically active game or a craft activity. Did you spot one I missed? Please do let me know!
To see for yourself how much your children can learn from each book they read click here to find a set of activities that is perfect for you or explore the activities we have created for National Simultaneous Storytime on May 22nd.
I wrote Maths 'N' Movement in 2012 and have revisited and revised the program several times since then to improve and expand on the original idea of combining Mathematics and Physical Activity. The seven curriculum mapped programs improve students' understanding of Mathematics while teaching them the Fundamental Movement Skills. Each program now includes twenty physically active STEM activities so students can have fun practising mathematical concepts such as tables, addition and subtraction or telling the time. A detailed video explaining the program can be found here: https://www.learnfromplay.au/maths-n-movement-activities
Bloomsmath was my first teaching program which I authored more than two decades ago and have continued to revise and expand several times. Bloomsmath, of course, applies Bloom's Taxonomy to Mathematics outcomes with five sequentially more challenging activities for each strand of the Mathematics curriculum. Bloomsmath is a wonderful complement to Maths ‘N’ Movement as children move through the program to build confidence and deepen their understanding of each grade appropriate outcome.
Students first complete the ‘Knowledge’ outcome to prove their competence in each strand before advancing through progressive Bloomsmath activities up to their ability level. Each strand finishes with a bank of questions to prompt metalanguage discussion and encourage creative thinking around Mathematics. Sample activities and more information can be found here https://www.learnfromplay.au/bloomsmath. And if you have any questions or suggestions, I welcome your email.
Original Posters
Originally developed to brighten classrooms and inspire students, we also turned these posters into computer wallpaper / backgrounds so they might be used as virtual backgrounds for online teaching. Each of the 40 original posters showcases a famous saying or phrase to encourage and remind children to be better, do better, persevere, develop resilience, be themselves and love who they are. I also take inspiration from the quotes on the posters and I suspect I am not the only one!
These posters are exclusively available to premium subscribers and they are able to be printed anywhere up to A1 size. If you have not already done so, print some for your learning area today: https://www.learnfromplay.au/posters-and-virtual-backgrounds
Oh wow! Thanks for sticking with me! I know it’s a lot! People are amazed that Learn From Play was my little Pandemic project as it has continued to expand and evolve and it now looks much bigger than myself, my husband and our small team of graphic designers. I absolutely love being a teacher librarian and I love creating and sharing resources that support educators to help make learning fun!
With my Masters degree FINALLY completed this week and with the growth of Learn From Play requiring more time than I could give in mornings, evenings and weekends, I am so thrilled to be here an extra two days per week thanks to everyone who purchased a paid subscription in 2023.
But of course we can do better! We have MORE original stories slated for publication this year and these projects need funding to succeed. So if you are currently a free member, I would love to tempt you to become a premium supporter with 40% off for the first 500 educators, parents and individuals to sign up.
For 40% off any individual plan use the code BACK2SCHOOL
Thank you so much! Please explore the various areas of the site and download some great activities for your learners and do let me know how you go via email or on any of our social media channels.
Happy 2024, let’s make it great!
Rachel McCann
Founder
If you have any questions about our resources, would like to suggest a book we do not yet offer or have feedback on how we can better meet your needs please contact me Rachel@LearnFromPlay.com.
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Sneak Peak: Next month’s blog will look at Learn From Play’s eleven original stories and how you can use these to teach Stranger Danger, Environmental Education and Protecting Australia’s Native Animals.
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