Iwona is a parent at a school in Norfolk. Her daughter is in Year 5 and they have been using Learning with Parents since Year 2.
Before using Learning with Parents, I was struggling to support my daughter with learning at home. She needs some extra support in Maths and English and I didn’t know how to help her but wanted to be able to. She would often get tired and frustrated and because English is not my first language I didn’t always understand the home-work being set and how to help her.
I was really excited when school started to use Learning with Parents – from the beginning it has helped make learning at home fun. My daughter instantly started to enjoy homework and this is the most important thing for me. When she comes home from school she asks me “What game are we going to play?”
The videos in each topic are easy for me to follow and help me understand how she has been learning the topic in school. They are also a really helpful reminder for my daughter and she always understands what we need to do.
We find it is more fun when we do Learning with Parents as a family. We sit down together, watch the video on our phone and then play the game together. We spend however long she wants to on the activity and are always led by how she is feeling. It is always a relaxing time for us. The other day she sat with her Dad for 40 minutes playing the Tutti Frutti game! As they were playing, I could see how much progress she is making and how much she now enjoys English.
We often go back to games we love playing too – like the Battleships Maths game! It is a great game because we can all play it together and our daughter loves being competitive and beating us. It is one of those games which is exciting but she is learning at the same time too.
We both work long hours and finding the time to do home-learning can be difficult so the fact that we have two weeks to do a topic really helps us – it doesn’t add pressure to our home-life and means we can choose when to do the activities. Learning with Parents has given us a way to support our daughter but also given us ownership to do the learning how and when we like.
As a family, we are all feeling more confident about learning at home together now. Thanks to Learning with Parents, my daughter now has more confidence in Maths and English and importantly has more confidence to ask us and her teachers for help if she does not understand something. Learning with Parents has also given me and her Dad the tools to talk to the teachers more and ask them questions if we are unsure of something.
As parents, we now feel more connected to our daughters’ education and progress. Previously, we always worried about whether she was making enough progress but because we are now able to engage in her learning at home we can see it for ourselves and this is really reassuring.