Gold Star Books for Back to School - Parragon Books Review

After 6 weeks of Summer Holidays, it was time to head to back to school for Big Sister (Year 1) and Little Brother to start regular Preschool. We were all very excited when Parragon UK sent us some Gold Stars books to give them a kick-start into the new school year.

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We received from the Gold Stars Collection, the “Wipe-Clean Numbers” book (3-5 years) and the “Big Workbook Handwriting” book (4-7 years). Big Sister instantly grabbed a pencil and started doing the exercises in the Handwriting book. This book is designed for Early Learning and KS1 level and starts with pencil control and shape exercises for those just starting to form letters.



The book progresses onto each letter and practising the recommended method based on National Curriculum. In begins with lower case letter and then focuses on numbers and Capital letters. Big sister has been practising handwriting for single letters in class and as homework. The book introduces to her how to start joining the letters together in a word. It starts with double letters like “ee” and “oo” but then provide guidance to how to join together like “ae” or “er”. This progress to learn how to connect multiple letters together in the word.

I also really like that words that are used in the handwriting practise are also works that follow along with phonics learning. Looking through the book, I can see many of the same words that used in Big Sister’s reading book as she processing through phonics learning. Common words like “and”, “the”, “is” “it”, etc. The books ends up with looking at practising writing full sentences, names of colours, months and how to write an address on envelope. One of the final exercises in to writing the following sentence that uses all the letters in the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” I have fond memory of this sentence from my days of learning to type. This book comes with 100 gold stars to reward Big Sister for her efforts.

Little Brother immediately started looking through the Gold Stars book of Wipe-Clean Numbers. It came with a black erasable pen and has 20 wipe-clean activities. This book is aimed at 3-5 years to practise writing 1-10. Each number has 2 designated pages that shows the suggested place (red dot) to draw each letter and then several counting activities.

Little Brother is almost 3 and is still working on pen control but he enjoyed counting activities and that he could erase his drawings. Each counting activity is colourful and unique for each.

We were sent these books as part Book Buddies Program with Parragon Books. All reviews are honest and my own words.