Completed this activity with my Year 6 class but suitable for most year groups. Takes a short amount of explanation but then children can complete in groups or independently. Puts the onus on the children to think of their own word/arithmetic problems and checks their own understanding. Quite a simple task to run: children are presented with a room template with three doors containing a different answer on the front; they create a question card from one of their topics thus far and a correct answer for the question which aligns with one of the doors. These can then be compiled into a class set which can be preserved and used as you see fit, such as during wet breaks, golden time, a challenge during a lesson. This can added to as the year goes on and a way of revisiting topics. Files contain: room template, question card template, explanation of activity (editable).

Year 5/6 topic A lesson presentation and accompanying resource that shares examples of the exploits of the Ancient Maya and allows children to discover their uses to them at the time but also begin to make connections with our lives today. Children will complete an ordering activity whereby they decide on a hierarchy of importance for the inventions and subsequently justify their choices referring the explanations used within the lesson presentation and their own opinions.

A lesson focusing on the different purposes of colons and semi-colons, suitable for a year 5 and 6 class. The lesson uses the short video, Alma, as a means to capture the children’s attention. A SPaG starter is used as a warm up before the children are taught the many different purposes of the punctuation and then apply it to their own sentence. This is a very hands on lesson with a lot of back and forth between the teacher and the children. An extension activity is also offered if time allows. This is one of the lessons as part of my descriptive unit of work on Alma, which can be found here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/alma-unit-of-work-12200651

This is a lesson for early on in a World War 2 unit of work or to provide children with some contextual knowledge for the period surrounding World War 2. It contains a presentation giving key information and events that preceded the war with explanations as to their importance. Differentiation is involved in the recapping of events and the ordering of the timeline, furthermore a detailed paragraph considering the significance of the events is offered. Also included are the planning for the lesson and the resources for the timelines.

This lesson is designed to give children an active maths lesson where they do not realise explicitly they are being taught maths but rather see it as part of a fun, challenging experience with their classmates. It contributes towards the goal of keeping children physically working to at least a moderate intensity of thirty minutes a day and has proven to capture children’s attention across ranges of ability. The presentation attached guides you through each activity that the children complete, whereby they complete a series of games as teams and then are tasked with adding up their scores in the form of fractions. This gradually gets more challenging but will allow children to show their understanding of grouping fractions to create whole numbers or to create other fractions and work as a team. This lesson in particular covers fractions for Year 6 (comparing, ordering, adding, subtracting and multiplying), however it is easily modifiable to suit other topics of maths and other year groups. I will be uploading further lessons at a later date. To begin the lesson, the children complete a simple warm up moving round the space, this can be practicing their times tables to having a number card and completing commands if the statement said matches their card. They will then join a group designated by the colour of the card/beanie bag and complete the activities. The lesson requires either tables moved to the sides of the room or hall space to be effective. It also requires: an assortment of cones, beanie bags, mixture of different coloured balls or similar item, hoops.

The follow up to the first Active Maths Lesson. The first lesson proved incredibly successful with the lower ability children all taking a proactive part in maths in mixed ability groups and saw fantastic reasoning, grouping and questioning between all children. This lesson follows a similar structure in how the games are played and the summative learning at the end. However there is a focus on using their knowledge of multiplying and dividing fractions to work out their scores and complete the scavenger hunt. I have used blue, white, red, yellow and green for my scores as they are the most abundant coloured PE resource we have in school. This is easily modifiable based on your own schools. Pack contains: presentation with games and explanation; scavenger hunt activity sheet; scavenger hunt questions; lesson plan.

Differentiated resource sorting multiples into Venn diagrams.

Part of the War Horse - Historical Story Writing Unit of work (3 weeks). https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/historical-stories-war-horse-war-game-and-one-boy-s-war-12205177 This lesson is a cross curricular lesson that incorporates historical inquiry to tie in with a later English lesson. Children have been reading War Horse in class and are now going to use what they have been exposed to in the story to study the importance of historical accuracy when writing about a specified time period. The lesson looks into the term anachronism in order to then allow children to research factual information, the daily life of those in World War 1 and their hobbies and roles in society with the aim of identifying features that they can include in their own writing for contextually accurate pieces. Attached is the presentation for the lesson, the lesson plan and some research for children to use if they do not have access to books on the time period of internet access.

Year 6 - Lesson presentation, activity sheet and lesson plan focusing on the experiences of those who remained in cities whilst others were evacuated. Culminating in a descriptive, emotive piece of writing in the first person as air raid sirens are sounding and the movements between the home and the air shelters. Activity sheet contains helpful prompt questions and success criteria for piece of writing.

Activities and presentation containing tasks and challenges to enable children to apply and develop their learning of percentage equivalents in an active manner. A treasure hunt is the final activity that is included which involves a development of the fraction work children will have previously done in class alongside their understanding of percentages. Cones, bean bags and small balls also required. This lesson should be conducted in an area with space.

Presentation and activity sheet exploring the use of formal and informal vocabulary. Allows children to investigate reasons for either type and attempt to use their own. Included: presentation; differentiated activity sheet. Could be taught as part of an English unit or a stand alone lesson. Follow on lesson sees the application of formal and informal vocabulary alongside another presentation.

We had noticed in our class that some children found the task and skill of editing their work difficult, not because they were not trying but because they didn’t know where to start. We added in editing windows to try and help focus the children’s attention and give them a narrower section of text to start with. The editing widows are adapted for particular purposes and can be used to help children focus their editing in a range of writing tasks. Proven to aid children in particular who struggle to identify areas to improve their work and to concentrate higher abilities on a criteria they may not have included to improve their work. Included are editing windows focusing on: Range of punctuation Subordinate and relative clauses Adverbial phrases. Examples of the criteria are offered on each window alongside a purpose or definition of the feature to aid children in using them. Cut out the central panel and children can place the window over a paragraph or section of their work at a time. We laminated our windows for longevity purposes. Hope they prove just as useful to your class as they have mine!

A two week poetry unit focusing on the theme of villainous characters. The lessons entail an analysis on ‘The Spider and the Fly’, and ‘The Raven’. The children will spend time learning about the narrative of both poems, analysing them for poetic devices and then practicing and performing the poems. The language used in both poems is challenging and provides a good opportunity for children to delve into older language and use their contextual knowledge to try and pick apart the word. The lessons shall then progress to the children using the narrative focus of The Spider and the Fly’ to create their own poem on a predator and prey at a level that we do not often see, incorporating the poetic devices that they have been analysing.

Two-week unit of work focusing on the narrative poem ‘The Highwayman’. The lessons focus on inference and retrieval skills before immersing the children in the different character’s and analysing the story plot in detail. The purpose of the unit of work is to get children to familiarise themselves with poetic devices before using them to continue the narrative poem after the death of Bess.

A 2 week unit of work based on the novel, The Nowhere Emporium for a year 6 class. Each lesson has differentiated tasks or outcomes based on ability. Within this unit, the children will read extracts from the novel, develop clear settings making use of thought out expanded noun phrases and develop their understanding of characters motives and personality. The outcome to this unit is to produce a suspense narrative of Daniel discovering a new Wonder and a biography of Lucien Silver in the third person based on what they learn from the novel but also allowing children the ability to ‘fill in the blanks’ by creating suitable quotations about him from other characters or identifying quotations from the novel. Extracts needed from the novel are included but having a copy of it to hand is recommended for those children to use to skim through. In each powerpoint, room has been left for a word of the day. Hope this proves helpful!

15 lessons (5 weeks) of Guided Reading material utilising the novel ‘A Monster Calls’ by Patrick Ness. The pack includes 5 sets of skill based comprehension questions that test students on their retrieval, inference and deduction skills over the course of the unit. Secondly the pack contains a guided, lesson by lesson, teacher question and record sheet with question prompts, answers and areas to note progress in the children. The lessons are split into three per week: The first is based on reading a section of the novel with guided teacher questions to prompt discussion along the way. The second lesson is a focused practice whereby children are given questions similar to those they would receive in their comprehension work. The children can work as a group to decipher what the questions mean and how to solve them. In my experience, this can be teacher-led initially until the children get the hang of it. Finally, the third lesson is an independent lesson for the children. They are given 6/7 comprehension questions from the next section of reading that they would not have seen previously and utilise the skills that they have been practicing previously in the week.

A Guided Reading resource for a Year 5/6 class based over 27 lessons on the book 'Skellig’ by David Almond. This resource contains the planning for each lesson and the pages that should be read in each as well as questions and prompts for the teacher. It also contains the comprehension pack for the children to complete every third lesson. The lessons are split into three parts. Lesson 1 is a shared/classroom discussion lesson that focuses on all children and teachers reading a set amount of pages. As children read they should be challenged through the selection of vocabulary in the pages and asked inference and retrieval questions throughout whilst reading this gripping tale. Lesson 2 focuses on applying the skills of a written comprehension. Children shall re-read the same pages from the previous lesson, however this time they shall be given a selection of questions that range in purpose; from inference, retrieval, prediction, knowledge of language and more. The questions and wording shall be discussed as a class and then as groups children shall work through these problems and then their answers shall be modeled and shared as a class and supported through teacher involvement. Lesson 3 acts as an independent lesson that pulls together the different skills the children have been working on. They shall read the next specified section of the book and then complete a comprehension sheet on the read pages. The children will be expected to put into practice the type of answers they have been working on as a class and use the code at the top of the comprehension page to help them identify the manner in which they should answer the question.

This is the full 15 lesson, unit of work for historical writing. One of the free lessons from this unit is found here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/war-horse-anachronims-and-historical-research-lesson-12202278 The unit contains a focus on the study and use of historical stories through World War One as a cross curricular approach to teaching English with History and Drama. We use War Horse as inspiration for work to developing characters, identifying different sentence types whilst becoming familiar with vocabulary from the time period through research based lessons. The aim of these lessons is to compare the book with other adaptations of War Horse before attempting to write their own screenplay of a scene, adapted for their purpose with appropriate dialogue for their chosen scene. War Game and One Boy’s War are included to add further insight from a soldier’s perspective with a focus on creating an understanding of the realism of war and for children to appreciate the horrors, squalid conditions and misleading nature of the war that they joined (some rather enthusiastically). Children shall use research skills to discover the true nature of the trenches that soldiers fought in and create a letter home as a soldier to a friend who may be considering enlisting. In this letter they shall have to decide whether they would encourage or discourage their friend from enlisting. Finally, the audience and purpose for their writing shall change from informal to formal, where they write a historically accurate piece for an exhibition. All necessary resources are included as well as additional tasks based around War Horse for children to complete as homework if they have access to the book at home.

This is a complete unit of work focusing on the use of the short video - Alma. This is aimed at an upper Year 5 class or early Year 6 class. It contains 6 lessons focusing on a descriptive writing element to the story, whereby the children develop a story focusing on setting; relative and subordinate clauses; cohesive devices; colons and semi-colons and then a descriptive recount and edit. The additional three lessons focus on discussion and persuasive writing. However the third and final lesson can be split into two depending on the time allowed for the lesson and the ability of the children. All planning is included as well as the resources and supporting resources necessary to conduct the lessons and activities.

This resource contains two weeks of lessons (9) and planning using the critically acclaimed picture book ‘The Watertower’. 6 lessons involved in the planning are aimed at supporting key elements and features of SPaG that shall be used in the end goal of writing a newspaper report describing the Watertower and its impact on the community of Preston. Within these lessons, children are presented with the opportunity to explore their own interpretation of the book, look into the difference between factual information and rumour and create their own short descriptive story as to what happens to Bubba but is only implied (which can be a short story from a 1st or 3rd person perspective). The final lessons are a step by step planning guide to creating a newspaper report focusing on creating a balanced viewpoint on whether or not the watertower should be pulled down, followed by an editing lesson and final write-up lesson. Checklists and success criteria are provided alongside the presentations and all resources that are needed for each lesson. It is suitable for later on in Year 5 or Year 6 class. I highly recommend obtaining a copy of the book (whilst images are present in the presentations needed for the lessons) so that the children can study the images more closely. Would also be a very useful book for some creative writing and inference and retrieval reading lessons. Lesson 5 requires the use of newspaper reports from local sources or national papers. Suitable articles would include those that have discussion topics, present information about factual events or persuasive articles to show the contrast in report writing.