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!
This is a fun lesson which allows children to learn and appreciate other social aspects of life during World War II. It starts by questioning children’s current understanding and enjoyment of entertainment via the radio, and informs them of its importance in the 1930s.
It includes example radio clips from the war, asking children to discuss their features, and then goes on to compare those with clips from present day news broadcasting (both radio and television).
The lesson objective and success criteria are as follows:
Objective: To be able to write and broadcast a World War Two radio news bulletin
Success Criteria:
I can select key information about an event
I can bias my report in favour of the Allied war effort
I can use emotive language to engage the listener
I can speak clearly
I can use intonation and expression in my voice
In my lesson I gave children facts about a particular bombing raid in London and asked them to report it as if they were a 1930s broadcaster. It was brilliant to see them dramatising their pronunciation and tone, and how they took different perspectives about the same event. I’ve left it open in the resource presentation as to what resource you would want to use for the children to complete this task.
There are lots more WWII resources in my shop too if you want to link further lessons. Enjoy!
This is a great lesson to introduce a World War II topic. Using a Notebook presentation, it involves a range of discussion and activities helping children to understand what a world war is, why WWII started, what the two main sides were and why these alliances were formed. The lesson follows the objective and criteria:
Objective: To be able to locate the Allies and Axis powers
* I know the meaning of Allies and Axis
* I can use an atlas to locate countries involved in WWII
* I can identify which countries were Allied or Axis
* I can explain why countries may have formed alliances
The main lesson activity involves children using atlases to identify countries in Europe, and then either independently or as a class understanding and marking whether each country was Allied or Axis.
Having taught in an East London primary school, I wanted to end the class WWII topic by linking it to their own community. East London was a huge target during the Blitz, therefore was devastated during the war, which children in the area might not realise given the infrastructure around them. However, the lesson mainly compares WWII problems with modern day life in East London - positive and negative. It gets children to examine their own community, identify what is good, and what could be improved, and what they imagine it will be like in the future. The lesson activity is continuous through the lesson; making notes about what they think Hackney is like, and then develops to the children using their notes to write a poem (using my teacher example).
Although this resource is focused on East London, it could be adapted to focus on area of London or the UK that was particularly affected by the Blitz. Resources include a Notebook lesson presentation, a worksheet for making notes, a presentation page for children to write their best copy of their poem and lots of picture resources.
Helping children to practise their dictionary skills in order to support their spelling, this lesson and worksheet gives a selection of purposely mis-spelt words and their dictionary definitions. Children use their dictionary to find the correct spelling. They can also challenge themselves by thinking about words they know they commonly mis-spell in their writing.
Used successfully during an OFSTED inspection. Suitable for KS2.
This resource helps children to consider the progression of time chronologically and the duration of different events. The lesson objective is to be able to create a daily routine using time facts
Success Criteria:
* I can order events chronologically
* I can use vocabulary linked to the time of day
* I can identify what time activities start and end
* I represent times on an analogue clock
Challenge: I can state how long activities last
The lesson starts with a discussion about what key events would be included in a daily routine, with children thinking of their own personal examples. It then moves on to a teacher model of how time would be considered in a daily routine, from the start and end times to knowing the approximate duration of activities (i.e. they would know that brushing your teeth takes 5 minutes rather than 50 minutes).
Children then independently create their own daily routine plan on the worksheet provided, which has been differentiated to challenge different learners.
This lesson would suit KS1 and LKS2 classes and is easily adaptable. Enjoy!
This lesson models to children how to solve problems involving time using the following Success Criteria:
* I can identify the key words in a problem
* I can identify the calculation needed to solve a problem
* I can add time by counting on the number of minutes
* I can count across the hour
* I can find the difference between times using subtraction
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.
I cannot include worksheets for this lesson as I would be copyrighting other people's resources, but they are easily available via Primary Resources or a quick Google!
This resource is taken from my Zoom online courses during COVID. The pack consists of 1 x Powerpoint presentations/lessons and linking worksheet teaching all about BODMAS; introducing the topic and then moving through to challenge. Suitable for Y5-6 with extra challenges included to push higher learners. As it’s from my courses my logo is included on the presentations and worksheets but you can obviously remove these to make them your own!
Click on my profile to find FREE lessons from my Zoom courses (see most recent uploads), so you can see their layout/content/flow before choosing to purchase this one.
This lesson introduces children to Limerick poetry and gets them to try writing one of their own. I used this as a one-off lesson, but could easily be extended across one or multiple weeks. I made a cross-curricular link with our class topic, water, and again, this resource could easily be adapted to suit your topic or year group.
Also included is a planning worksheet for your class to brainstorm their ideas before writing their poem neatly either on the sheet provided or independently in their books. Enjoy!
'Hunted' is a short animation film which starts with a young, naive, native tribesman wandering into a hunter's campsite. The comedy and animation effects really draw in children and I have found it a brilliant resource to use to develop their writing description.
This resource contains a full lesson and planning worksheet for the children. It focuses on developing the children's description of the setting, characters and their feelings as events progress. It can easily be adapted to challenge a different Literacy skill or to suit your class.
Enjoy!
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 BBC News website in 2013, a huge blizzard brought much of the north-eastern US and eastern Canada to a standstill, leaving about half a million homes without power.
Included in this pack is a copy of the article and linking comprehension questions suitable for KS2.
Enjoy!
I made this lesson to help my class develop their variation of sentence starters. My lesson notebook models different examples using the helpful poster (which can be made into a dice) and then gets children to apply their understanding by recounting the animation of George and The Dragon (as our Literacy topic at that time was Myths and Legends).
This can easily be adapted to link with a particular theme or year group.
In this bundle are 11 of my favourite individual recount themes that I’ve used in my teaching career to develop children’s writing skills.
Each uses a brilliant animation or film resource to engage the children and each has a particular writing skill focus (e.g. description, tense, sentence structure).
I hope you enjoy using them as much as I do!
I used this lesson to revisit time connectives to improve the flow of my class' writing. The lesson itself starts with a recap of what time connectives are, why writers use them, and the brainstorming of different examples.
It then moves on to challenging the children to use time connectives when recounting the events from the funny short film, 'The Black Hole', before they go on to independently complete a piece of writing - either recounting the events of the film or by writing their own story featuring a mysterious black hole.
This worksheet allows children to thoroughly plan and design their own product that uses magnets, following this success criteria:
I can list some ways in which magnets are used at home and school
I can suggest other ways in which magnets could be used
I can present ideas using labelled diagrams/notes
This lesson would ideally be used after learning about forces and magnets, allowing children to creatively demonstrate and extended their understanding, cross-curricular with DT.
In this Art lesson, children compare different portrait artists by studying 6 examples (each with the artist given) and then using the internet to research the date that the portrait was completed and who it is a portrait of. As an extension, they can also describe the use of colour in each portrait to compare the different examples.
Artists to be studied include; Yousuf Karsh, John Singer Sargant, David Hockney, Picasso, Da Vinci and Rembrandt.
This resource helps children to understand the concept of inheritance in biology using the following success criteria:
I know that living things produce offspring of the same kind
I know that living things pass down particular characteristics to their offspring
I know that offspring will inherit characteristics from both parents
I know that offspring are not identical to their parents
In the activity they will think about their own characteristics and then compare these with their family's characteristics (parents, siblings). They will then use The Rugrats as an example to show how offspring can be similar to one or both of their parents, but not identical.
Suitable for upper KS2.
I made this resource based on the 2016 John Lewis Christmas advert. It is about a dog called Buster who loves watching his young owner dream of being a professional gymnast, but then as her surprise gift is built on Christmas Eve, Buster appears becomes upset when the garden wildlife get to have a go, unbeknown to the family. The next morning, as the little girl flies out of bed and out into the garden to try her present, the family are lost for words when Buster pushes her aside to leap on to the trampoline first.
I wanted to use this advert, not only because John Lewis adverts have become incredibly popular in the run up to Christmas, and therefore children find them very entertaining and engaging, but also to develop children’s description, focusing especially on verbs. Included are two differentiated story plans, a vocabulary sheet with larger screen shots from the film and a Notebook flip chart or Powerpoint presentation for teaching the lesson. This can easily be adapted to develop a different Literacy skill or to suit a particular year group. Enjoy!
And also see other Literacy recount lessons inspired by John Lewis Christmas adverts in my TES shop!
**UPDATED 05/11/2018 TO INCLUDE POWERPOINT VERSION OF THE LESSON PRESENTATION**
This resource is a worksheet with a clear outline of a world map, on which children are challenged to draw key world rivers on. This can be used in a Water topic or to simply develop geographical knowledge / map reading skills.
Using atlases and/or Google Maps, the children will locate each river, match it to the area on their map and try to accurately draw it on and label it.
The rivers children are challenged to locate are:
1. Mississippi 4. Thames 7. Nile
2. Danube 5. Huang Ho 8. Niger
3. Ganges 6. Amazon
I made this resource to link Year 6’s ICT and Science topics: internet researching and energy.
The objective of the worksheet is to research facts which complete the tables / questions given.
The topic covers a range of different types of energy and examples of how they are used across the world.
The last task gets the children to research facts of their own for one fuel type.
This resource is the perfect introduction to a half termly topic which I have used from years 3-5 to teach children about the human body, skeletons of both humans and animals, food groups and digestion. This particular lessons gets children to brainstorm what they already know about animals and humans, and what they would like to find out, helpfully allowing you to adapt your planning to match their subject knowledge..
Objectives and success criteria include:
1) LI: To be able to produce facts that state my current understanding
1) LI: To be able to ask questions which would develop my understanding
Success Criteria
I can state what I already know about a given topic
I can ask questions linked to a given topic to develop my understanding
I can use a range of question starters (what, who, how, when, do...)