Mrs Mactivity is a website for teachers and parents with loads of printable resources to aid children’s learning. The resources are aimed at Early Years, KS1 and KS2 age children (although at the moment there are not many resources for KS2).
Despite being a teacher I wanted to focus on this review being from a parent’s perspective as this is what makes the Mrs Mactivity website unique. I was intrigued to find out whether it really is different to other teacher resource websites that are available, and whether it is actually parent friendly.
A yearly subscription to Mrs Mactivity currently costs £9.97 but in just a few days it’s going up to £12.97. This gives you access to ALL of the resources for 12 months. In all honesty I would expect this rate to change as more and more resources get added daily and I do think that is only fair too. Other similar subscription websites charge much more so Mrs Mactivity is actually refreshingly cheap at the moment.
After subscribing I logged on and had a look round the website. I’ve got to say it looks great. The colours and fonts remind me slightly of the Jaqueline Wilson books: bright and visually appealing.
So where do I start as a parent? Well my youngest is 4 and going to school in September and she is really keen to learn so I downloaded some pencil control sheets. She loved them. Easy peasey! Then I went ahead and downloaded some simple phonics sheets and handwriting sheets to practice reading and writing letters and she loved those too. Check out her singing happily and getting annoyed with big brother trying to help!
There really is lots of choice for preschoolers getting ready for school. I love the cutting skills sheets too: a super useful skill to have mastered before school. Looking for some number work I found the dot to dot sheets. At this point my 6 year old son had come over to see what was going on so I printed him off some of the harder 5 times table ones and her some of the simpler dot to dots. They raced through them, in fact it ended up that I couldn’t keep up with them wanting to do more and more sheets! It’s a good job that the resources are designed to be more economical on ink, and there is the option to print black and white versions too!
I decided to try out one of the provocations which are hands-on activities aimed at early years children. As a KS2 teacher, provocations is not a term I’m familiar with so I was pleased to find a useful you tube video to explain what they are. It was also good to see that there was a single sheet to download for the activity, perfect for parents, and a plan pack of sheets which are better for child care professionals. Seeing this made me think this website is not only useful for teachers and parents, but childminders too. If you need a bit more guidance with provocations and other activities there is also a support team you can contact and a members’ Facebook group to help you along.
The weighing and sorting provocation was a huge success with my preschooler and again big brother wanted to be in on the action! The activity generated a huge amount of discussion not only between the children and I, but between themselves too. Helpfully there are suggested questions on the downloadable sheet to assist you in getting the best out of this opportunity. Currently there are 3 provocations on the website, I hope they add more!
With my 6 and 4 year olds well and truly on board with Mrs Mactivity, I was keen to try out some resources on my 8 year old. I printed off the Greatest Showman mindfulness colouring sheets as mindful colouring is something he has done at school and he says it really helps him relax. He loved them! I also showed him the Summer Reading Challenge and he jumped at the chance to do it, opting for the Ninja themed bookmark and stickers. It only took him a couple of week before he’d read 6 books (of a substantial length too!). I was surprised too with how he engaged with the Summer Screen Time Challenge where children earn screen time by completing non-screen related tasks. It was such a success it’s something we will keep going all year round!
With my teacher head on I can see there are loads of useful classroom activities and display resources such as KS1 visual timetable, calendars, lettering, borders, sound mats, word mats, etc. It is different to other resource website out there so you’ll be able to show your individuality by using display resources that don’t look like everyone else’s! The display resource packs for Early Years and KS1 are worth the subscription fee alone and my personal favourite is the calm and natural display resources which has lots of soothing colours of leaves and beautiful pictures of nature included.
In my opinion Mrs Mactivity is an exciting new website for parents looking for resources to support their children’s learning. The more I scroll through the pages the more ideas I get, like making posters out of the common exception words materials for the kid’s bedrooms, and also remembering that the writing frames are great for presenting themed pieces of homework. I am sure I will use it a lot over this next 12 months and look forward to seeing how the website develops.
I have just one ask of Mrs Mactivity though – please create house rules posters and a home visual timetable as we could really do with those!
Ad/ We were given a years subscription in return for this review but all views and opinions are our own.
