Simple advice for parents on helping a child with phonics.

Simple advice for parents on helping a pre-school child to write.

Consider where the food that we eat comes from. Grown at home, locally or in another country? Discuss food miles. Who does the shopping, cooking, washing up? Where does the water come from? Cook a meal/dish and write the recipe to send to your link school. Suitable for years 5 and 6.

Explore how to find and present information about inventors and inventions. Give a talk as part of a group. Watch and listen to inventors explaining their ideas online. Make notes and contribute to a creative class book about inventors.

Since the ban was lifted South Africa has become one of the World’s top sporting nations and has even been awarded the World Cup in 2010. But what impact did the ban have on the lives of South Africa’s sporting stars of the past?

Children return to the notion of a staple food. They look at uncooked couscous grain and discuss how this grain is a staple of much of North Africa and Middle East. Then children cook vegetable Tagine and enjoy eating it!

Remind children how important water is to all living organisms. Look at how little of the water present on earth is fresh and therefore drinkable. Children investigate how animals and plants adapt to arid conditions and create posters to encourage us to save water. Suitable for Y5 pupils.

Practise cutting and joining skills by making a moving Dogger. This session links to English Plan 2 Stories with familiar settings. Learn how to cut well, make a hole in cardboard and construct moving joins using paper fasteners.

Children discuss the advantages and disadvantages of texting and emails, then write an email with attachments to an email ‘pen pal’ about their favourite session from this topic.

Introduce children to bacteria, viruses and fungi as micro-organisms. They are living organisms and are very small. Investigate how the numbers of bacteria grow by simple division and gain an understanding of their size compared to a metre. Suitable for Y6 pupils.

What have plants ever done for us? In this session children find out that plants are more useful than we might imagine. After discussing all of the benefits and recording them, children start to consider how what plants give us can be used in more creative ways.

What do children do when they are not in the classroom? At playtimes, evenings and weekends? Discuss sport, games and hobbies. Write instructions for a playtime game or making a craft object to send to their link school friends. Try an African game or craft. Suitable for years 5 and 6.

Using the techniques of flour resist batik, children create wall hangings in the style of the Mozambique batik they have studied. Children are encouraged to carefully select techniques and tools to create a quality product.

The world is in their hands in this session along with the Moon and the Sun! Children create drawn scale models of each and use a trundle wheel to measure scaled distances between them. Suitable for Year 5 pupils.

Listen to the Rhythm of the Rainforest in this session! Children start by studying the Baka people who live in the African Rainforests, looking in detail at their instruments. Children then create simple instruments of their own using junk modelling techniques.

Through artwork/ poetry/song the significance of the ‘Rainbow nation’, and of valuing diversity, is celebrated. Suitable for years 5 and 6.

An advice leaflet for parents with information on computer safety and the benefits of computers.

260 million people can’t be wrong! In this session children discover that there are few differences between the sports they like and participate in and those that children in Africa enjoy, before experiencing some traditional African games.

The host of the 2020 Olympic games will be …? The groups present their Olympic bids before the winner is announced. The real decision won’t be made until 2011, but will Africa be awarded the games for the first time?

Following session 7, children look at which types of material are attracted by magnets and which are not. Using an experimental approach, they also investigate the two magnetic poles on a magnet and what happens when like is placed against like, etc. Suitable for years 3 and 4.