This full resourced lesson describes to younger pupils what the 2017 general election is they can understand. It introduces them to key vocabulary such as ‘voting’, ‘Member of Parliament’, ‘House of Commons’ and ‘ballot box’. All you need to do is slice up 30 pieces of paper and a cardboard box for your class to use to vote! During this interactive lesson, pupils will learn how people vote, who they vote for and what MPs do. They then vote for a class MP / student councillor to give voting a try themselves!

I have to be honest, this is my favourite lesson in my shop. I have taught it numerous times and it has always been fun for pupils and staff! This lesson allows pupils to help the Captain get as much treasure as possible to the ship by designing a boat which will hold lots of gold (or marbles to you and I). Once you’ve explained the task, pupils draw designs for a new, weight bearing boat and explain how they’re going to test the boat to show the Captain (the teacher) how good their design is. After that, they build their model out of plasticine, test their boats in water and record the results. The winning team always gets treasure in the form of golden chocolate coins!

Three days on instruction texts for upper KS2 to feed into the task of writing instructions for making a ‘cursing potion’ - an activity from week 2 of The Book of Bad Things planning which can be found in my shop. Day 1: Going through an example instruction text Day 2: Imperative verbs Day 3: Paired write of an instruction text (making a ‘bad breath potion’ for their enemy)

This is a lesson to help elect school councillors and explain Democracy in the UK. The pupils then ‘campaign’ to be a school councillor before the class votes to elect them. This has been used across KS1 and KS2 to teach pupils about one of the ‘British Values’ and to elect responsible school councillors. All classes in my school really enjoyed the lesson, especially totting up the votes!

These sheets (which are differentiated three ways) give children the opportunity to use expanded noun phrases in a scaffolded way. These sheets would be great for helping pupils describe animals/characters using expanded noun phrases as part of a wider English topic or as a stand-alone SPaG lesson on expanded noun phrases! Pictures can be altered easily to suit your English topic.