I have been teaching across the foundation phase and Key Stage 2 since 2004, and I have created a wide range of effective resources for all sorts of topics and subjects, all of which have been tried and tested with my own pupils. Most of my resources are already differentiated, as I know how much time this saves. I hope other teachers find these resources useful and that other pupils enjoy and benefit from them as much as my classes have. All reviews/ratings gratefully received!
I have been teaching across the foundation phase and Key Stage 2 since 2004, and I have created a wide range of effective resources for all sorts of topics and subjects, all of which have been tried and tested with my own pupils. Most of my resources are already differentiated, as I know how much time this saves. I hope other teachers find these resources useful and that other pupils enjoy and benefit from them as much as my classes have. All reviews/ratings gratefully received!
I created this project for my Year 3 class, but it could be easily adapted used in Y4 or higher. I based a whole week around it, including thinking skills, applying maths skills, designing products and advertising. I split my class into mixed ability teams for the week. The powerpoint file introduces the task, and contains instructions for every part of the task as you go through the week, including examples to demonstrate each maths activity. The maths activities are all differentiated for higher, middle and lower ability groups, and include calculating factory opening times, converting distances between metres and kilometres for 'distribution' and calculating production costs (multiplying by 2, 4 or 40). There are group thinking skills templates, which I enlarged to A3 for groups to brainstorm ideas for cereal types, flavours and brand names. There are also templates for designing a cereal box, an advertising poster, and a cartoon strip-style planning sheet to storyboard ideas for a TV advert. Afterwards, we filmed an advert for each group using an iPad and green screen.
I wrote this pantomime script to perform with a very large Year 3 class and Year 4 (62 pupils total), so it has plenty of parts for a large group of children. There is a variety of parts for different abilities, with large, medium and small speaking roles, dancing and singing parts, and non-speaking roles. For a smaller group, you could miss out the first couple of scenes and start where Buttons introduces the panto part.
I have included EVERYTHING you will need (apart from a stage and some children!). All these resources are in this pack:
*Play script,
*Poster/front cover
*Lyrics for all the classic Christmas songs we used, and one song I wrote (shortened version of 12 days of Christmas)
*Cast list - shows the difficulty of each part and ideas for costumes, plus space to write the names of your actors for each part.
*Background PowerPoint - Background slides with scene changes, 'Strictly' scoreboard (insert photos) and credits at the end (insert children's names) for children to walk off at the end according to their parts.
*Props list - all easy to make or find.
*QR codes sheet - with links to YouTube versions (almost all with lyrics) of all the songs (I gave this as homework for children to practise the songs at home.
*Printable tickets - just change the date and time and print!
The title is "Cinderella's Strictly Christmas" and the story begins with parents, teachers and pupils all preparing in different ways for the school play, with auditions, etc, before launching into a pantomime loosely based on Cinderella.
Cinderella, Buttons, two wicked stepmothers, five ugly sisters, the King & Queen, four princes, the royal party planner and a host of other characters are all involved in this magical Christmas tale, culminating in a special Christmas 'Strictly' style dancing competition at the palace.
Four Christmas guests (Buddy the elf, Santa, Mrs Claus & the Grinch) arrive to judge, the ugly sisters dance with the princes in an attempt to win a grand royal wedding, but Cinderella and Buttons arrive at the end and they end up dancing and winning the wedding themselves, before getting married and living happily ever after! Finally Buttons gets the girl!
I used a selection of well known Christmas songs (some from the Home Alone films and a few other classics...all available on YouTube for practice), which many of my pupils knew quite well already, which made life much easier and made it really fun for everybody!
This took quite a while to put together, but hopefully it will save you a huge amount of time and work during this especially busy time of year! The children and parents at my school absolutely loved it! I hope you enjoy it too!