I completed my PGCE at The Institute of Education in 2011, staying in London to start my career at a primary school in Hackney. I taught across KS2 in four years, while also co-ordinating Spanish and Science and receiving brilliant CPD training across a range of specialisms. In 2016 I moved to Lancashire, where I have been supply teacher for a range of local schools. I love creating engaging & purposeful resources to bring education to life and to give teachers their weekends back!
I completed my PGCE at The Institute of Education in 2011, staying in London to start my career at a primary school in Hackney. I taught across KS2 in four years, while also co-ordinating Spanish and Science and receiving brilliant CPD training across a range of specialisms. In 2016 I moved to Lancashire, where I have been supply teacher for a range of local schools. I love creating engaging & purposeful resources to bring education to life and to give teachers their weekends back!
A range of lessons that will bring your class’ WWII topic to life, learning about everything from why the war started and who was involved, to evacuation and how events were broadcast, to the social changes brought into effect from the conflict, from the role of women to economic and industrial changes.
This lesson helps children to understand the difference between solids, liquids and gases by teaching them that each state of matter has different molecules. It starts by explaining what molecules are, understanding how they move by predicting which diagram is for which state of matter (with reason) and then linking solids, liquids and gases to every day objects to demonstrate their understanding.
Lesson includes links to useful videos, talk partner opportunities and an idea/model for a lesson activity. Suitable for KS1 and Lower KS2.
I made and taught these Art lessons alongside our class Victorians topic, helping children to understand why silhouette artwork became popular in the Victorian period, how silhouettes are made and identifying everyday objects by their silhouettes.
The first lesson is an introduction, as described above. The task gets children to match images of everyday objects with its silhouette.
The second lesson gets children to work in small groups to sketch their portrait silhouette outlines using torches and pencils.
The third lesson brings a modern twist to the portrait silhouette, by getting children to fill their portrait not with solid black, but with drawings and colour linked to their own personality (which could be linked to Mindfulness in PHSE).
UPDATE 27/03/2019 Presentation now available in Powerpoint format.
This resource is a class assembly that I did with my Year 3 and 4 classes about our cross-curricular topic for the term: Light.
To make the script I split the class into five groups, and gave each group a question to research with helpful bullet points. They went away and did this over a lesson, making the notes from which I made a class assembly script! The script can easily be adapted to change children's names or to add or take away parts. The script also includes visual activities or objects that groups can be showing to support their part of the assembly.
Group topics include:
What is light?
Sources of light
Darkness
Shadows
Reflections
It is designed to be an informative assembly, but fun and easily for an audience to follow. Enjoy!
Nelson Boles' 'Little Boat' animation is surprisingly powerful - taking a simple boat through a range of settings which sees it become more and more damaged by human life, storms and war, but with a surprising and heartwarming ending.
This Literacy lesson challenges children to image they are the boat themselves and recount it's story in the first person, describing what it can see, but also what happens to it, and its consequential feelings.
Lesson pack includes writing plan for children and full lesson notebook! Enjoy!
As an introduction to your Plants topic, get children to brainstorm what they already know about plants. This will help you to direct your future planning more precisely by not repeating old knowledge or allowing you to plug clear gaps in understanding.
Also, this lesson will allow children to brainstorm what they would LIKE to know, which gains you an insight into their interests about plants, helping you to produce engaging and focused lessons to inspire them!
Here is an activity/worksheet I have used to teach children across KS2 to investigate whether shape affects air resistance, using the following success criteria:
• I know forces affect how objects move
• I can explain what air resistance is
• I can explain how air resistance affects real life objects
• I can design objects with good/bad air resistance
The activity involves children filling in the gaps in a paragraph to demonstrate their understanding of air resistance, then identifying what air resistance might be happening in picture scenarios, before being creative and designing two paper aeroplanes; one with bad air resistance, and the other with good - explaining how they can predict what will happen.
This activity would link well with primary teaching of forces, specifically gravity. It is in two parts: the first requires pupils to demonstrate their basic understanding by filling in missing words into a information paragraph about gravity (the missing words being at the bottom to select from). The second part requires children to demonstrate their understanding of gravity from own experiences, drawing pictures of where they have seen the force of gravity in action.
Suitable for a Upper KS1 or Lower KS2 classes. Enjoy - and look out for more of my Science resources in my TES shop!
This lesson explains why gas masks were used during World War 2, including video clips from the 1930s reminding people to carry their masks with them at all times and to practise wearing them once a week.
The lesson brainstorms what they were made from and their effectiveness, before comparing adult and child gas masks. The lesson objective is for children to make a gas mask using given materials, considering comfort, effectiveness to keep out gas, and appeal for children to wear them.
There are lots more WWII resources in my shop too if you want to link further lessons. Enjoy!
Oktapodi is the story of two in-love octopi who are suddenly separated (the female to be sold as food) leading to the male to endure a fast paced and exciting quest to rescue her.
The objective of the writing task is:
To be able to write a narrative using descriptive language
Success Criteria:
*I can give my narrative a beginning, middle and an end.
*I can write in simple, compound and complex sentences.
*I can use adjectives and similes to describe.
*I can use powerful verbs and describe them using adverbs.
*I can include my characters' viewpoint (how they feel).
The resource pack includes a presentation for the two days of activities (day one, writing; day two; editing, improving and re-writing), a planning sheet for children to make notes on before completing their narrative.
This activity gets children to compare the UK and Egypt's most important rivers; the Thames and the Nile. Using ICT, they will compare their size and overall importance by researching their length, depth, origin, mouth and major cities that they pass through and how each river has been used historically by their country.
This would be a good cross-curricular activity to use if you are studying the Ancient Egyptians or Water/Rivers in your topic work and want to cover lots of skill sets.
Planet Unknown is a brilliant futuristic animation about a two Space Rovers, sent to find potential inhabitable planets using 'nSeed' pods to detect the possibility of growing plants. In the story, the two Rovers are undertaking their mission, but suddenly find themselves battling through an asteroid shower.
This resource is two lessons; the first gets children to brainstorm descriptive language for the two characters and the setting, while the second is the writing recount of events from the film. The two objectives are as follows:
1) To describe a film setting and its characters
2) To be able to recount a film as a written story
These are each supported by specific success criteria to aid children's writing.
This pack includes a Smartboard presentation with detailed slides for both lessons, a planning worksheet for lesson one, and screenshots JPEGs of the characters and the setting
It can easily be adapted for different KS2 year groups and a particular skill focus, e.g. tense, sentence starters, grammar or vocab. I have kept it as a general recount focus involving all skills.
This individual lesson teaches children how to structure lines in poetry to make them rhyme. I have linked this lesson to our Science work on the body, but this can easily be adapted to suit any cross-curricular theme or year group.
Included is a whole lesson presentation, which allows you to model skills to the children and to challenge them to have a go themselves, and a worksheet for children to brainstorm their vocabulary ideas and structure before writing their poem up neatly into their books.
Enjoy!
These three worksheets would be perfect for children's independent work when learning about / understanding the difference between human and physical geographical features of locations. In this example, I chose a task involving the whole of the UK, a task focusing on London and another focusing on Edinburgh (these cities due to their visual differences and geographical distance, which could then lead to good plenary discussion when evaluating outcomes.)
Children cut out pictures from each location, try to stick them by the matching place name in the table, then decide whether it is a physical or human feature. The London/Edinburgh sheets can both be used either in one or two lessons. The UK sheet will require atlases or Google Maps for children to look up key locations.
Two lessons worth of worksheets, getting children to study examples of Ancient Greek clothing, before going on to design their own Ancient Greek top (which in my class we made using cheap white t-shirts!)
When developing my children's comprehension skills, I don't like using photocopies from text books and meaningless expectancy sheets. I prefer to use purposeful, educational and REAL LIFE examples to engage and inform them, while still challenging them and looking for those reading skills.
Therefore a lot of my comprehension challenges are based around interesting newspaper articles. In this example, taken from the Telegraph in 2013, a new species of tarantula roughly the size of a dinner plate is discovered in a Sri Lankan village.
Included in this pack is a copy of the article (still available online) and linking comprehension questions suitable for KS2.
Enjoy!
This bundle contains three different lesson activities, all of which develop children's atlas skills. One activity gets children to use an atlas to locate rivers of the world, another gets them to locate UK cities/rivers/parks and the third teaches children about latitude and longitude.
This lesson models to children how to convert times between the 12 and 24 hour clocks using the following Success Criteria:
* I know that there are 24 hours in a day
* I know morning = am / afternoon = pm
* I label an analogue clock using 24 hour times
* I can use my clock to tell the time across 24 hours
Challenge: I can tell the time to the nearest minute
It is contains a balanced mixture of partner talk questions, teacher modelling and independent activities, along with helpful links to resources to support the objective. It even has a challenge plenary at the end, asking pupils to write 24 hour times on a blank analogue clock.
I've included a short lesson activity for this lesson, but I cannot include worksheets for this lesson as I would be copyrighting other people's resources, but I have included links on one page to analogue clock resources. Enjoy!
This task, linked to Ancient Greek topic work, gets children to study different examples of Ancient Greek pottery, before they design their own pot shape outline in their books. They would then use this as a plan for when they make their pot from clay, following the instructions on the sheet.