Summer with Gold Stars

Summer with Gold Stars #SummerwithGoldStars

You may remember that I went to BritMums Live back in June and one of the companies I was really interested in meeting up with was Parragon.  I’ve loved reading reviews of their books from other bloggers and was interested to see what they had to show us. Well they set us a challenge – the Summer with Gold Stars challenge!

Summer with Gold Stars

Parragon have a range of Gold Stars work books suitable for children aged 3-11 years, working with pre-school through to Key Stage 2 learning aids.  Monkey starts school next week (next week!!! – I will remain calm) so I was eager to get a better understanding of the Summer with Gold Stars challenge.

We were given a Gold Star book – Ready for School, aimed at children aged between 3-5 years and asked to complete a page a day for 30 days.  Monkey has been somewhat reluctant with regards to writing, so I was hoping that this challenge might help.

Summer with Gold Stars

Of course what I should have realised that the lure of getting a gold star sticker for every completed page would get my son sitting down and cracking on!

He has loved Summer with Gold Stars challenge.  I’ve found it quite emotional actually. Monkey has been trying to write letters, he’s written numbers.  He’s had a go, yes, he’s got frustrated at times but he’s come back for more.

The idea behind the challenge is to keep children engaged with learning during the summer holidays.  Monkey, as with everything works at his own pace.  He has friends who are writing all sorts of things, we haven’t managed his name in full yet.  But I know he will get there, and the fact that he has loved sitting down with this book, has thrilled me.  It’s a massive step forward for us.

There are 123 challenge pages in our book, varying from letter forming challenges, number recognition and shape sorting.  There are also more complex pages – being able to write words, so this is a book we can spend time with.  We can pick it up and complete other pages over the months to come.  We’ve gone through some of these pages, with me just explaining them.  He has already started working with phonics in his Nursery class, so is aware of quite a few of the letter sounds now.

I’ve noticed this series of books in our local Sainsburys and I can thoroughly recommend them.  I like the idea of short little exercises, great for someone like Monkey.  He can concentrate for a few minutes and then move on to something else.

Our Summer with Gold Stars 30 days challenge took us a little longer than planned as we were both ill last week.  But earlier this week he completed his 30 pages and will continue to gain more gold stars as he takes this book on his school journey.

Priced at £7.99 I’m really pleased we were asked to take part in the Summer with Gold Stars challenge.  I’m so pleased with my little star.

disclaimer:  we were provided with the book shown in order to complete this challenge

6 thoughts on “Summer with Gold Stars #SummerwithGoldStars

  1. We totally failed with this challenge. Firstly, I lost my book at Britmums. Then I seem to have misplaced the second one on returning home. God knows where it’s gone in the house, but it’s not with the other drawing and writing books N has. I tried working through pages with N, but he’s just not fussed. He just wants to write N’s over and again.

    Stickers don’t do anything for him, so I’m really hoping over the next year he gets a bit more interested so he’ll be ready for school learning next Sept

    1. Stickers don’t normally do much here either, but something clicked with this book. May be that he only had to do a few tasks on each page to earn a reward? I’ve been impressed with the book.

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