B2 could have started school in September. It's been very weird to see a lot of his peers who did start school having their first parent-teacher meetings recently. If B2 was in school, he'd be behind with literacy, but way ahead in maths. Yet the focus would still be on him being behind in literacy things.

In the three weeks since signing B2 up for a Mathseeds account, he's managed to make it to level 41. Levels 0-50 are reception year lessons, so the same things he'd have been learning in school between September 2016 and July 2017. When B1 is doing her maths work (she'd be in year two if she was in school) I have to keep him away from her because he annoys her by answering the questions before she can.

His Reading Eggs account is sitting at level 13. When he decides he wants to do a little Reading Eggs he's quite confident at doing it (and last week read one of the books on there independently for the first time) but for the most part he has very little interest in phonics, reading or writing.

I have no issues with any of that. He's summer born, still not yet four and a half, right now playing is more important than anything and that is exactly what he spends most of his time doing. Yet, some of the children who were born at the same time as he was are being given extra homework or placed on learning pathways to try and help them catch up with the other children in their class. Some of those children will have been five since September, they are 10-11 months older than B2 and his peers. That's not a huge difference to adults or older children, but it's a huge difference to four and five-year-olds.

Printable dot to dot alphabet

I'm not sure how I originally found them, but a few months ago I purchased the printable dot to do alphabet charts from learning4kids. It's very rare I pay to buy anything like this, I either make my own, download something from Twinkl or find a free alternative, but I was drawn in by how bright and simple these look and I've not been disappointed.

We printed them out and laminated them so they can be cleaned and reused. Thanks to B2's sudden new found love of 'doing learning' they've been cleaned and reused a lot over the last few weeks.

One of the things I struggled with when trying to teach B1 how to write letters was getting her to understand when she needed to write the letters all in one go and when she needed to lift her pencil. The brilliant don't lift or do lift information in the corner of each of these has made teaching B2 how to do them has been an absolute breeze in comparison.

Having had so much success with these I intend on purchasing the printable dot to dot numbers charts at some point. The clean and simple looking pages are so much easier than the workbook versions we've been using recently.