Learning and revising with Education Quizzes

Once the summer holidays are over there are two big changes in school for the Junior JibberJabbers when they return to school. Master JibberJabber will be going into Y2 which of course means all the KS1 testing. For Miss JibberJabber it is a new school as she starts Y7 at the local secondary school. 

For the past year Miss JibberJabber has done little else at school except for constant revision for KS2. At one stage she was having extra Maths before school, double Maths during the day and an hour extra after school! In between the focus would switch to Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar. It's not a recipe for an all-round balanced education but I'll leave the discussion about that for an other day. With the summer holidays in full flow it was time to try out Education Quizzes.

I started off with Master JibberJabber and the KS1 section. I asked him what topic he wanted to do and he chose Maths and then Addition. Each quiz has 10 questions and four multiple choice answers. Each question in the Addition section is written differently so for example one asks 'What is the total of 3, 4 and 6?' whilst another will ask, 'What must be added to 9 to get 16?' This is really useful if you are wanting to prepare your child for the KS tests as from the ones I have seen the wording is designed to catch the children out and confuse them rather than test them on their Maths ability. 

Since the questions are multiple choice some parents may feel that their children can guess at the answers and still get a question right. Whether you get the question right or wrong there is an explanation as to either how the question was structured or further information about the answer. What I also like is that there are so many topics on Educational Quizzes. We have a number of workbooks but they all focus on just a single area.

After Master JibberJabber had gone through his section I let Miss JibberJabber loose on it. Being 11 she knows her way round educational websites and has used several through her junior school. She has been desperate to get stuck into her new subjects. She started off on the KS3 Science tab and picked out some starter topics. I did warn her that they were designed for ages up to 14 and there would be many areas she hadn't covered yet.

In fact Miss JibberJabber enjoyed the quizzes so much that I had to wrestle the laptop off in order to write this! She then continued with the Art and Design section and went down all the different topics in that section. Apparently she has also now done Citizenship as well!

I think if you are home educating this could be a particularly good site. I realise that one of the reasons people do choose to home educate so they don't have to follow the National Curriculum but since the basis of this website is quizzes rather than how a subject is taught there's so much to choose from. You can go through the age groups and the KS sections but also under 'Specialist Subjects' there's a whole range of different topics. These are prefect for general knowledge but also for adults wanting to brush up on their facts. I have to admit I did a few of the 'London' quizzes myself. There's also a printer friendly version of the pages you can print off if you are needing them to host your own quiz. 

The cost

The best things in life aren't actually free and neither is full access to Educational Quizzes. A month's subscription costs £9.95 but there is no contract so you can cancel at any time. There's a selection of free quizzes you can try out before you sign up. With it being a month at a time you could register for holiday times or when your child has some exams coming up. 

The verdict 

We were given a login to an educational site from my son's school and told to look around it. We duly did but I couldn't make head or tail of it and without any other instructions it was quite pointless. In fact I think I will mention to them they can have a school account with Education Quizzes! With Education Quizzes we were able to dive straight without any lengthy instructions. My daughter loved it and for my son it was great to have a much wider choice of subjects to go through together.

I was given the opportunity to try Education Quizzes for review purposes. All photographs, words and opinions are my own.