Review: Twinkl Primary Resources – Mummascribbles

I love doing educational stuff at home with Zach. I am always trying to test him on his alphabet, counting, naming animals etc., and I think it’s incredibly important that we as parents support our children’s learning at home alongside any nursery or school. So when the people at Twinkl were asking bloggers to get in touch to review their site, I couldn’t not contact them.

About Twinkl

Twinkl was started in 2010 by a husband and wife team, who also happened to be a primary school teacher. It was initially started as a resource system for their fellow teacher colleagues and has since gone on to be a resource for parents who want to support their children through the curriculum at home.

“Twinkl Resources is your first choice for easy to use, trusted and high quality teaching materials for educators and parents worldwide – professionally crafted materials with a personal touch.”

Twinkl offers three subscription levels to users:

Free membership is available and allows access to the majority of their resources. Gold membership is their high quality, low cost option at £29.95 a year

Platinum membership allows access to all resources and is priced at £44.95 per year.

Whilst the free membership is wonderful, obviously without users subscribing to this service, they would sadly not be able to continue supplying resources and paying people to make them!

What we think of Twinkl
Twinkl is like a minefield – a fantastic minefield where you just keep finding new things! Upon opening the website, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of resources on there but it’s quite simple to navigate as it’s broken down by the stages of curriculum that the child is at. There are sections for early years, key stage one, key stage two, special educational needs, English as an additional language, parents, the International Primary Curriculum and a special section called create where you can create your own resources using a selection of templates (note that this is available to platinum subscribers only). They also have a forum where you can go and discuss learning, resources and lots of other topics.

With a two year old son, I have obviously focused on the early years stage of the curriculum and I have been enjoying printing lots of resources out for us to use at home. I particularly like the colouring pages available (they had some lovely Christmassy ones), and we have used the word cards to try and get Zach practicing, recognising and using three letter words like tap and mat.

We have also used the numbers flashcards, trying to get Zach to recognise his numbers.

One other thing that we have been using is the reward charts they have and these are fantastic. We were struggling to get Zach to brush his teeth properly and we now use a chart which gets him a sticker every time he brushes properly. It is situated on the fridge door and it has helped us get him to brush his teeth much better than he was!

We are also using the toilet training chart which awards him a smiley face if he successfully goes on the potty. This is also a massive winner at the moment although sometimes he wants a whole smiley face for a very tiny wee! Can you see all those Sunday smiley’s?!!

Overall, I think this website is fantastic. It has everything you could require to sit down with your child and help them to learn. It would be especially fantastic for home-schoolers! There is so much more that I need to explore and sneakily print out at work!

Is there anything we don’t like?
There isn’t really anything not to like about this website. I think it has a varied mix of parent/teacher resources. Some of the stuff is clearly for the classroom and if you don’t use your printer options wisely then you could end up with a lot of individual pages but it does guide you in how to get multiple pages shrunk down to one page when you do print which was pretty handy. I could have ended up with a lot of paper coming out the work printer! I feel like I need to find something negative for this section to be worth writing but I can’t find anything!

You can find all of the resources above and thousands more at http://www.twinkl.co.uk/

Disclaimer
I was given access to the Twinkl platinum service for the purpose of this review but all opinions and words are my own.