Our 10 Favourite Learning Resources at Home

With Mud & Bloom, bringing awe and creativity into our days, it’s as easy as opening a box.

Mud & Bloom brings the magic of the seasons right to your doorstep, tucked inside a monthly box of wonder. Nana gifted us a six-month subscription for our Little Acorn’s fifth birthday, and it’s a monthly treasure arriving again and again. There’s so much to adore: each delivery is an invitation to pause, delight in nature’s marvels, and share joyful moments together.

Each monthly box includes:

• An art and craft or two or three
• Fruit, veg or a herb to sow
• A plant or flower to sow
• Information cards with stunning instructions, illustrations and quizzes relevant to the season
• Inspiration to get the family outdoors

Subscription prices vary depending on which box you choose.

Nana’s gifted subscription is due to end shortly. Will we subscribe again? 100%. We love learning, gardening and crafting in Mud & Bloom style – It’s wonderfully gift-wrapped in seasonal enchantment.  What’s equally important is that it saves me time. As a home educator, there is much to do, organise and plan, and our Mud and Bloom boxes mean I have nature crafts all already prepared for me. While my son receives this beautiful box in the post, it’s a gift to me too.

Exploring Nature With Children by Lynn Seddon is a gentle invitation to fall in love with the world around us. Woven through our Home Education journey, this delightful curriculum feels less like a lesson and more like a shared adventure. Each week, inspired by the seasons’ rhythms and Charlotte Mason’s wisdom, our family—my husband, our little one, and I—step outside together, discovering nature’s secrets hand in hand. We started the curriculum in September last year, with the intention of making nature a core subject in our learning journey, and I can say that its year-long path is a treasure we hope to return to again and again, finding new wonder with every turn.

This curriculum feels like it’s for the whole family and provides a week-by-week nature theme. It will work well if you have children of varying ages, as the reading and activity suggestions can be adjusted easily for all ages.
Another bonus is that Twinkl have lots of supporting crafts, activities, and videos to couple with this nature study!

Stay tuned for a new blog post on how we use this in our home education.

I mean, it can’t get any easier than this? National Oak Academy is aligned with the National Curriculum and is freely given. National Oak Academy takes the heavy lifting out of lesson planning on those grab-and-go days, allowing me to be more present with my little one.

Covering a variety of subjects from EYFS through Key Stage 4, Oak National Academy will provide you with lesson information, presentation slides, a video, and any worksheets or downloadable resources.

My Little Acorn (5 years old) and I recently danced and laughed our way through the Bat Learns to Dance Literacy unit, and we had so much fun producing our story map and miming. Echoes of this cute story of kindness and friendship have us ‘hoppity hopping’ and ‘flappity flapping’ around our home on a regular basis.

There are many other functions on the National Oak Academy for Teachers and Pupils to explore and easily weave into their learning experience.

Simple lessons and oh so free! That is a win for me.

What a blessing to have a local library!  A blessing that is easily undervalued, but will not remain an overlooked treasure in this home. Beyond books, our local libraries offer e-books, audiobooks, story sacks, crafts, clubs, and challenges for every age, from tiny hands to teens and grown-ups alike. Everyone in our home has a membership card, and we’re allowed 20 books each. TBH, we are almost always at the max, and I feel no shame. In fact, I’m proud!

Libraries are so worth the investment. For the price of completing a simple form, we have access to endless worlds that nourish our love for the written and the illustrated. Our little one has an immense love for books, story adventures, rhymes, facts, jokes; long may that love continue to blossom. No matter what theme we are studying or what interests our little one, the library will always have a book to fuel his wonder and curiosity.

So, if you haven’t already, pop into your local library asap and sign your child up – in fact, sign yourself up too! At the end of the home ed day, there is nothing like putting the littles to bed, doing their bedtime stories and then snuggling up with your favourite warm drink (that’s a cardamom chai for me) and escaping into a good whimsical novel.

The Good and The Beautiful offers softly illustrated, open-and-go curricula from nursery to secondary school. Perfect for those craving structure or who have little time to plan, TGATB covers a breadth of subjects.

TGATB curricula are comparably priced, and access to the Language Arts and Maths courses is free. TGATB’s resources are gentle in faith, so whilst they are not ‘preachy’ or overtly Christian, I can spot subtle nods towards Christian themes woven throughout.

“But they are based in America, how do I get my hands on the resources?” I hear you say. Well, I do know of UK home educators who club together their orders and share shipping costs. I simply opt for the digital downloads – I receive a downloadable, ready-to-print version, which I print, hole-punch, and organise in folders. If you opt for the digital version and don’t have a decent printer, you can always find a local printing service to print and bind for you.

When we first started home ed, the printer we had was so flimsy and unpredictable. There’s nothing worse than a dodgy printer, which makes planning for home ed triple the work! A reliable printer is essential for getting quick access to treasures like these.

Click here for my Home Ed Mama start-pack list.

Explorables is the inspired creation of my wonderful friend Mawuena—an author and a fellow home ed mama whose heart and expertise shine through every resource. With a background in Business Entrepreneurship and education, she pours her time into crafting simple, thoughtful printables for unit studies. I deeply admire how she weaves her gift into her children’s joyful learning, generously sharing her brilliance with us all.

Paw Print badges turn learning into an adventure, one challenge at a time. If you’ve glimpsed Little Acorn’s denim jacket on our socials, you’ll know it’s a tapestry of memories—each badge marking a place we’ve wandered or a challenge we’ve conquered.

Even if collecting isn’t your passion, Paw Print’s challenges are yours to download for free. Each theme—be it a season, a hero from history, or a day like Earth Day—offers a card of creative quests based on 4 areas: Craft, Food, Games, and Other. Whether you’re eager to dive deep or simply add a stitch of fun, Paw Print offers the sweetest way, with a badge waiting, for you to joyfully souvenir some of your home ed memories.

We first used “bite-sized” while reading the recent picture-book version of Coming to England by Floella Benjamin. We found the BBC has great little videos and fact files about key notable people. At first glance, BBC does look like it is focused on kids in a traditional school classroom setting, but there is a helpful section for on for home education, there is also a PARENT section that keeps you up-to-date with the latest information in Education and even a ‘MY BITESIZE’ section where you can save all your fave bits to your profile for later use!

We also use the app for games on the odd Friday afternoon!

I discovered TPT when I saw some great activities on the old Instagram. I followed the teacher’s link in their bio, and her products were very affordable.  Although we don’t use this as much as we did in our early days, we still use the resources we printed back then, and they’re a great resource to have in your home ed arsenal. It provides activities for a wide range of subjects for all ages. And even if you don’t purchase anything, it’s a great source of inspiration.