As part of students' study of Anne Fine's play Flour Babies, they can adopt an egg to look after during the holidays. You will need as many hard boiled eggs as you have students in the class to do this activity. Students are talked through the adoption process before signing an official adoption certificate. Students are required to complete a 'baby book' to record their experiences. This obviously emulates what the characters have to do with a bag of flour in the play.

This is an excellent, fun and challenging quiz to do with secondary school students in an English lesson. This quiz tests students’ knowledge of children’s and teen literature. There are 52 opening lines - one for every week of the year - for students to try and identify. Students must decide which story the opening line comes from. Depending on your students’ ability, you can use the optional clues provided on each slide, available simply by clicking ‘clue’ on each slide. You can also challenge students to not only guess the story’s title but also the story’s author. There is plenty of scope for differentiation. Some notes for how to complete this activity are included in the ‘notes’ section the PowerPoint slides. Sample opening lines: “All children, except one, grow up.” - Peter Pan "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy." - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe “I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.” - Skellig "My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue.” - Twilight “Sophie couldn’t sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right on her pillow.” - BFG The opening lines range from The Hungry Caterpillar to The Fault in our Stars. This quiz is a fun thing to do at Christmas or at the end of term, or just as part of a reading lesson to encourage students to read by engaging them in the opening lines. This quiz also offers opportunity for students to discuss which opening lines are their favourites, perhaps encouraging them to seek out the stories to read for themselves.

In this PPT are seven fantastic brain teasers. These will definitely get your tutees' brains whirring away. For example: What is light as a feather, but even the strongest man cannot hold it more than a few minutes? Answer: His breath.

Fun little starter to get students thinking. They're asked to look at 8 different objects and try to group them into pairs and explain their reasons why. Students can work individually, in a pair or in a group depending on their ability.

Students are shown a collection of objects on the screen. They have two minutes to try and remember them all without writing them down. After the two minutes they must write down as much as they can remember. They are then able to see their age equivalent test score. For example, if they remember 10 objects, then they have the memory of an 8-year-old.

This is a list of 'symptoms' of Asperger's syndrome. Display these around the classroom before students enter. As a starter activity, ask students to tour the room, find the 'symptoms' and jot them down in their books. This opens up a discussion about Asperger's Syndrome. Video also attached which offers a very intriguing insight into autism and Asperger's Syndrome. This resource is taken from my KS3 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time SOW which you can buy from my shop.

This is a fantastic starter, guaranteed to engage the most disaffected students. Students look at images and decipher the message. For example, there is the letter 'X' made of cardboard boxes in one image, the message would be 'X-Box'. The practice image is 'hairspray'. The answers for each 'visual pun' are in the 'notes' box on PPT. This is a quick 5-10 minute starter that gets students thinking about more than what's at surface level. This activity could be a route into a lesson on looking for deeper meanings, inference and deduction.

These are two little sheets to stick in the front of students' books. The 'marking key' is a simple guideline for students to understand your own little codes and markers that you use when marking their books. You would fill this in together at the start if the year by writing your own symbols on the board. The 'personal targets' sheet is for students to self-assess themselves at the start of the year. This allows you as a teacher to gauge an understanding of how the students self-assess. It is useful to look back on this at different points during the year to see whether students think they've made progress in certain areas.

This short activity tests students' ability to follow instructions. It is a fun starter and shows students the importance of reading ALL the instructions before starting a task.