This display is all about the author Michael Morpurgo. Information is taken from the website michaelmorpurgo.com and consists of interview questions and answers. I used this in a Year 4 reading corner as he was a favourite author amongst this class. The resource also includes a picture of Michael Morpurgo and posters of some of his most well-known novels. The display is provided in Word format ready for you to edit and also PDF.

Seven sessions of planning, accompanying PowerPoint and paper resources. Each session takes around 30 minutes and are aimed at Years 5 & 6. The objectives covered are: To correctly use the common homophones – there, their, they’re and where, wear, were and we’re. To spell unstressed vowels in polysyllabic words. To spell words with common letter strings and different pronunciations. To spell words with common pronunciations but different letter strings. To explore the spelling patterns of consonants and to formulate rules. To explore the spelling patterns of consonants and to formulate rules. To explore less common prefixes and suffixes.

I first used this resource with more able Year 6 pupils, who were working towards the then Level 6 SATs test. The maths curriculum has changed since then, but this resource is still very relevant to the statutory requirements of the Year 6 and Year 7 programmes of study. The resource includes nine multi-part questions and a pupil self-assessment table at the bottom. It is great way of analysing pupils’ strengths and weaknesses at the start of a topic and I like to repeat the activity at the end of the topic to see progress and set the next steps. Alternatively, it can just be used as a worksheet or one off activity to consolidate learning. Resource is provided as both a PDF and a Word document if you would like to adapt it at all.

This is a maths trail that I devised for my pupils and involves them exploring the school grounds. It consists of two A4 pages of questions that can be really easily adjusted to suit your school grounds and the age/ability of your pupils. A great way for pupils to apply their mathematical skills and knowledge in context. The questions touch on many areas of maths including: percentages, measures (length), area, difference, calculation, time, shape, symmetry, reasoning and perimeter. I used this as a general baseline assessment at the start of the year and got lots of data to work with - not only from marking their work, but also from observing how confident they were with maths and listening to the things they were saying whilst going around the grounds. The resource is provided in WORD format as well as PDF so that you can adjust to suit your school grounds or the ability of your pupils if necessary. Ideas for use: Moving Up Day: get to know the personalities and mathematical abilities of your new class before September. End of year fun outdoor activity - no prep but can stretch out for a whole afternoon! Small guided group activity or assessment opportunity. Make it a team building exercise by using mixed ability groups and introducing a prize for the first team back with the answers! Baseline assessment at the start of a new school year. Activity to be left with a supply teacher or a group of pupils who are staying behind from a school trip/residential.

Ready-to-go PowerPoint with 12 different activities based on the area of measures. These are activities that I have used with my class of Y6 pupils and I have collated them onto one PowerPoint for ease. Really helpful as starter activities, homework, revision, mental maths lessons, morning task and early finishers’ task. Some of the activities could also be used as a main lesson activity whilst you are working with a guided group as there are quite a few questions on some of the slides. The mathematical ideas covered include: - Converting units (mass, length and capacity). - Worded problems involving measure. - Time. - Imperial measures.

The resource includes photographs of 51 different instruments (common orchestral instruments and school percussion instruments) with their names underneath. The resource can be used in so many different ways and - if printed on card and laminated - it is a resource that can be used time and time again! Ideas for activities and uses: Matching the instrument to its name. Sorting /ordering according to different criteria, e.g instrument families, pitch of the sound, size of the instrument… Venn Diagram sorting, e.g. wood/metal, played with a beater/played by hand… Display or working wall labels. Music trolley/cupboard labels. Stimulus for a composition - assign or have pupils choose a number of instruments to incorporate in their piece. Provide pupils with a title for a piece of music, eg. ‘The Storm’ - what instruments might you use? Baseline/end-of-unit assessment task. Listening activity: play a piece of music and have pupils pick out the instruments that they can hear from the pile. As well as PDF, the resource is provided in Word format in case you want to edit the font or use a different name for a particular instrument. Thank you for looking and I hope this resource saves you some time!

This is a simple display that I put on the back of my classroom door. It consisted of an octopus in the middle with eight different ways of opening a sentence around it - one at each tentacle. One of my pupils drew and painted a octopus for me, but I have included an image of an octopus in the resource to save you time - just enlarge to A3. Of course, you could ditch the Octopus completely (especially for older children) and just display on the wall or laminate and add to a working wall. There is a PowerPoint to accompany the display, which is probably best if you focus on experimenting with one type of opener at a time to let it sink in! The PowerPoint is really plain and simple as it is intended to be annotated and used interactively as opposed to a presentation. Octopus picture credit: http://cliparts.co/octopus-clip-art

A set of nine mini-investigations that can be set up at different stations for pupils to move around and experiment. Idea for use: Laminate the instruction cards and set them up on tables with the required equipment. Provide groups with an A3 print out of the recording sheet to jot down notes as they carousel around the activities, or provide individual sheets at A4 size either during or after carrying out the mini-investigations. Files are provided in Word format as well as PDF for easy editing if necessary. The tasks are designed to link really well with the Year 4 Programme of Study for Science, but I did this with a Y3/4/5/6 mix class (!) and they all seemed to get a lot out of it. There was lots of discussion in the room and it was great to hear pupils practising the vocabulary of sound (e.g. vibrate, medium, volume, source). Would work well as a revision activity, baseline assessment for starting the topic, or as a Science Week activity. Year 4 ScienceProgramme of Study Sound Pupils should be taught to: • identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating • recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear • find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it • find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it • recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases

This resource is really useful for a fun end of term or Christmas maths or Enterprise activity related to planning a party. This is also great for honing team work skills as the pupils may have a strong difference of opinion and need to compromise. Simply choose a budget and send groups off to plan the best whole class party for their money. Pupils have to figure out whether the special offers are really that special and if the branded products are really worth the extra money. There are many ways that you could assess this activity, but I went round and talked to the children, asking them to justify why they had made certain choices. Maths Coverage Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals, Ratio Measures Money Problem Solving Reasoning Using a calculator (if desired) I followed this up with a discussion on healthy eating: what foods do we normal eat at parties? Are there healthier alternatives? This proved to be a really interesting and extremely worthwhile activity and resulted in a healthy end of term party. As well as PDF, the resource is provided in Word format to give you the opportunity to edit.

A whopping 69 ready to go activities - many of which can be easily adapted to use again. All of the activities are based on the number aspect of maths and have been tried and tested with my own class. There are a mixed or closed questions, mysteries, open-ended investigations, quick quizzes and worded problems. These are ideal for starter or mental maths activities - great for revision. Some of the more open-ended activities ended up spanning a whole lesson with my class as they took them off in different directions and made links with other areas of mathematics. I used them with Y6 but they could also be suitable for Y5 pupils. Mathematical ideas covered include: - Calculation with all four operations (mental and written methods). - Negative numbers. - Problems involving inverses. - Properties of number: factors, primes, square numbers, multiples, product, odd, even. - Place value - including decimals and rounding.

This is a set of 37 ready-to -go activities based on fractions, percentages, ratio and proportion that should save you lots of time. I have collated these from lessons that I have taught throughout the years - so they are all tried and tested with Y6 (and some Y4 pupils). Ideal for starter activities, morning task, homework, extending pupils, tasks for early finishers, mental maths lessons, revision and baseline assessments. I have described them as starter activities, but you will perhaps find that many of the activities can keep pupils busy for a whole lesson. The mathematical ideas covered include: - Calculating % of amounts. - Equivalence between fractions, decimals and percentages. - Calculating fractions of amounts. - Solving worded problems involving fractions, percentages, ratio and proportion. Activities include closed-questions, quick- quizzes, open-ended investigations, ‘Always, sometimes, never?’, scaling up recipes and worded problems. I really hope that you find this resource useful.

This PowerPoint is for a unit of work that took a week with my Year 6 class and looked at the features of discussion texts. Persuasive techniques are also revised. The texts are taken from The National Literacy Strategy ‘Argument Unit’. Children read and analyse a persuasive text ‘Should mobile phones be banned in schools?’ as a class and come to define the key features of discursive writing. Pupils then analyse a different text based on the circus and highlight the key features that they have previously identified. Pupils then prepare for a debate. Taking the story of the Pied Piper, pupils are assigned roles and have to prepare a persuasive speech to argue their point of the debate. We then hold debate and discuss the value of debates in real life. Pupils finish the week with two lessons to write a piece of discursive writing on whether pupils should be able to write on laptops in schools. Pupils are provided with the arguments for and against, but must do the rest of the work on their own. This then forms an assessment piece. National Curriculum Links: Year 5 & 6 Programmes of Study discuss and evaluate how authors use language, including figurative language, considering the impact on the reader plan their writing by: identifying the audience for and purpose of the writing, selecting the appropriate form and using other similar writing as models for their own. Through debate the pupils also hone their speaking and listening skills and this also provides a good opportunity for assessment.

A fun ‘Where’s Wally’ themed display with tricky ‘W’-words and matching example sentences. Pupils can refer to the display when they unsure and select the correct spelling. Word format provided, as well as PDF, for easy editing. Picture Credit - Wally and Woof pictures from http://freecoloringpages.co.uk/?r=wheres wally

Reports should obviously be very personal to each individual child, so I am in no way suggesting that you will just cut and paste comments from this resource. However, from experience, I know that your mind can go blank after a while (particularly on the 27th report!) and it can help to have a bit of inspiration. This resource includes: Tips for report writing from my experience - particularly useful for NQTs. Lots of example statements that I have taken from previous reports I have written, grouped into categories like, ‘Poor presentation’ and ‘Struggles with friendship groups’. Examples of personal statement sections (high-achiever, middle-achiever and SEND). I have also thrown in some examples or generic statements that I wrote for core subjects (maths, reading, writing and speaking & listening) differentiated from Level 4 - Level 6. The statements might not be true to your cohort but I have included them just to give an example of the kind of generic paragraphs that you might write at the beginning of the report writing process. This allows you to cut and paste the level that best suits the child in question and then edit the paragraph to make it more accurate and personal and also to give it a better flow. The statements are all taken from real reports and are perhaps most applicable to Key Stage 2 pupils. I have included the resource in PDF version and Word version. PDF is probably the best to print as it will keep the original formatting, but I have included a Word version as this enables you to copy, paste and edit more easily. The I hope that you find this resource useful and time-saving…writing reports really is the worst!!

A ready to go resource with six activities based on algebra. Perfect for starter activities, homework, extension task for early finishers or morning task. Although I have labelled this as a starter, several of the activities could easily keep pupils busy for a whole lesson - particularly finding the 10th, 100th and nth term of sequences and the ‘Always, sometimes never’ activity based on four different expressions. Mathematical ideas covered include substituting numbers into algebraic expressions and finding the nth term of sequences. Some of the activities are closed questions, but most require pupils to investigate and use the higher level skills of reasoning and justification. I used this activities with my Year 6 pupils as various points of the year and have collated them on one PowerPoint for ease. I would say they are suitable for able Y6s and could also be used in Key Stage 3.

This resource looks at the three main types of sentence structure: simple, compound and complex. Opportunities are given for pupils to: Learn the features of each type of sentence structure. Use the terms noun and verb and consolidate their understanding of word classes. Use the terms main clause and subordinate clause (the idea of adult and child is given as a pictoral representation). Identify sentence structures within texts: a newspaper article and an extract from Roald Dahl’s ‘Matilda’. Up-level sentences by adding suborindate clauses to simple sentences before, after and in the middle of the main clause. Use commas correctly the mark clauses and clarify meaning. The presentation has little activities throughout, which you could build on to structure a mini unit of work or just dip into for ten minutes at a time. It would work well as an introduction earlier down the school, revision in upper KS2/KS3 or with a guided intervention group who have gaps in their understanding. I found it particularly useful for assessing the pupil’s understanding of the vocabulary associated with sentence level and word level work.

A sheet of questions to give to pupils when they enter Year 6 or Year 5 in September (or at the end of the previous year) to assess strengths and weakness and to inform planning. Comes with answer sheet and assessment tracker. Mathematics Covered: Read, write and order numbers to 3dp. Order mixed set of numbers to 3dp. Use tables to work with decimals. Use multiplication facts to devise square numbers to 12 x 12. Explain place value to 3dp. Add and subtract decimals to 3dp. Multiply and divide decimals by 10/100 and integers to 1000. Compare fraction by cancelling common factors. Work out simple % of whole numbers.

A one off lesson planned as an addition to the Investigators IPC Unit. The lesson was designed to be fun, but had a more serious purpose of developing the pupils ability to write conclusions to scientific experiments. The lesson is based on the premise that the previous night when I got back from the staff meeting someone had eaten my chocolates - I had made a big thing the previous day about the chocolates that my colleague had bought me for helping her with her assembly. I had my suspicions about which member of staff it was but needed proof - the job of the pupils. Pupils do finger print analysis, handwriting analysis, chromatography and DNA barcode analysis to gather evidence and come to a conclusion (justified with evidence) about who stole the chocolate. I did this as a real life investigation with some very willing colleagues. Selected pupils were sent off to obtain fingerprints and alibis from the four suspects and when presented with the evidence our criminal teaching assistant did a great acting job when coming clean! Obviously you don’t need to go this far if you don’t want and you can just do the lesson as it is without basing it in your own school. Wherever possible, I have included Word versions of the files as well as PDFs so that you can customise to suit your own school if you like. This has everything you need to get going - you will just need to label four different kinds of pen, e.g. whiteboard marker, ink pen, biro & felt-tip. The resource includes a teacher lead guided group with focused questions and recording sheet. Linked to Science APP Grid. This lesson was rated outstanding by Ofsted. It can be used across KS2 and would work brilliantly as a fun lesson, observation or as part of Science Week. Enjoy!