Fiona, of Teachers Telling Tales, has taught in the UK and international schools, trained teachers, worked as environmental educator, in a range of learning support roles and she is currently a tutor.
Through Teachers Telling Tales she aspires to share this experience through creating high quality and affordable resources. While most are targeted at the primary age range, the aim is to provide versatile and adaptable resources to suit a range of ages and abilities.
Fiona, of Teachers Telling Tales, has taught in the UK and international schools, trained teachers, worked as environmental educator, in a range of learning support roles and she is currently a tutor.
Through Teachers Telling Tales she aspires to share this experience through creating high quality and affordable resources. While most are targeted at the primary age range, the aim is to provide versatile and adaptable resources to suit a range of ages and abilities.
Get creative colouring these cool ice lollies. There are 4 character designs and 6 outlines of different shaped lollies to colour. Great for talking about flavours, colours, patterns and preferences.
As a challenge, children could think up a name for their ice lolly and maybe even design the packaging too.
Print or stick on card for creating textured lollies using collage with sequins, beads etc.
Check out the other ice lolly and ice cream resources by Teachers Telling Tales. This resource is included in the ‘Ice Ice Bundle’.
Chill out this summer by making cool ice lollies! Outlines to print, colour or decorate using collage. Fold in half and paste with a lollipop stick (real or made from the template). Ten designs.
Ideas for use:
Design your own lolly - choose your shape, colour, pattern, flavour, toppings etc. Great as a stimulus for speaking or writing.
Use for role play, (no dripping unless you use a lot of glue!)
Use beads, sequins, pom poms etc. for sprinkles.
Create a cool character. Add eyes, arms, cool sunglasses etc. Googly eyes and pipe cleaners are great for this!
Make a puppet show with your characters.
At home: a great craft activity for a party or play date.
At school or play scheme: these make a fantastic display.
This is a good way to keep children occupied after making real ice lollies and waiting for them to freeze.
Check out the other ice lolly and ice cream resources by Teachers Telling Tales. You can also purchase this resources as part of the ‘Ice Ice Bundle’.
A massive minibeasts collection! Perfect for a topic on creepy crawlies and their flying friends. A range of activities from movement, board games, sudoku puzzles, mazes, Who Am I? quiz, book making, fine motor and cutting skills.
Good for mixed ability classes, students learning English and anyone who loves these little critters!
Logic and reasoning skills with a minibeasts theme. Featuring cute cartoon creepy crawlies, these activities are a fun way to develop thinking skills. Students cut and paste pictures to complete the sequences and sudoku squares.
Easy, medium and hard versions for different levels of challenge.
Ink saving variations included (different puzzles to the colour ones).
Perfect for a minibeasts topic, a challenge for early finishers or a discrete lesson in problem solving.
For related minibeasts resources, check out the Teachers Telling Tales shop, there are bundle and save options.
Guess the minibeasts in a quiz (PowerPoint presentation), make up your own quiz then create a mini book.
Through describing and guessing, children develop their knowledge about minibeasts and vocabulary related to colours, patterns, parts of the body, ways of moving, prepositions, habitats.
For more of a challenge students can engage in research to find out more (links to suggested websites included).
Instructions and templates for differing abilities are included for making origami books, a ‘mini mystery minibeast’ book!
The teacher’s guide has all the information, the quiz questions and screenshots for easy reference.
Check out the other minibeasts themed resources in the Teachers Telling Tales shop with bundle and save options.
Lots of fun activities to explore where minibeasts are found. Good for learning new vocabulary related to insects and small creatures, the natural world and prepositions. Can be used for games and classroom display.
Contains
a set of habitat cards and minibeast cards for sorting and matching activities.
which way home activity, choose and follow the lines
tracing lines, great for emerging writing and fine motor skills
mazes for more of a challenge
The minibeasts cards are perfect for creating class pictographs, of favourite minibeasts.
Try sorting minibeasts into groups, e.g. things that fly, nocturnal, etc.
Check out the other minbeasts resources in the Teachers Telling Tales shop, you can bundle and save.
This resource pack features a board game and a set of cards with ten minibeasts and corresponding movements.
The cards are great for brain breaks and circle times.
With the board game children perform the action when they land on the minibeast, for example, spin when they land on a spider.
There are variation prompts on the game such as saying a fact about the animal, saying how many legs it has or saying where it lives. The board also features pictures of where minibeasts are commonly found, for example, logs, flowers, a pond.
There are minibeast habitats resources (as well as a range of other minibeast activities) in the Teachers Telling Tales shop.
Improve cutting skills by cutting along the lines. Test skills with zig zag (straight) and wavy lines. Cute cartoon minibeasts at the end of each dotted line.
Check out the other minibeasts resources in the Teachers Telling Tales shop.
Sudoku is a fun way to develop concentration and reasoning skills. The challenge is to enter numbers (or in this case pictures) into grids so none are repeated in each row or column. These games feature pirate themed pictures, students cut and paste to complete the grids. This gives them the option of moving the pictures around before sticking them down.
There are 3 by 3 and 4 by 4 grids and three levels of challenge: easy, tricky and deadly. As well as improving thinking skills, the games are good for consolidating pirate topic vocabulary.
Pirate anagrams are a great way to introduce or reinforce topic vocabulary. This worksheet has picture clues alongside the mixed up letters and a space to write the word correctly. It can be kept to refer to when completing writing tasks to assist with spelling. Also useful as an activity for early finishers. A greyscale version is included for ink saving or for those who like to colour in their work.
The worksheet can be downloaded on its own or as part of a pirates pack, check out the other pirate themed resources by Teachers Telling Tales.
A bundle of fishy fun!
Perfect for ocean and sea topics or exploring language, shape, pattern and colour.
Includes mazes, dot-to-dots, tracing and colouring pages, Bingo and card games. Activity sheets at different levels of challenge with matching, cutting and sticking and beginning reading and writing skills.
These sheets inspired by Hooray for Fish! by Lucy Cousins feature little fish and some new fishy friends created by Teachers Telling Tales. They are great for developing fine motor skills, awareness of shape and pattern and early writing skills.
The fishy characters feature in a range of resources by Teachers Telling Tales on opposites, rhyming words and puzzles. They can be bought individually or you can bundle and save.
Featuring the beloved little fish and his mum from the story by Lucy Cousins, these activities explore the rhyming words: tiny and spiny, hairy and scary, carrot and parrot, lime and time, heart and dart. This pack contains sets of picture, silhouette and word cards, Bingo cards and simple worksheets with three levels of challenge.
There are greyscale versions of resources for those who want to save ink or include colouring as part of the activity.
Themes: rhyming words, fish, under the sea
Skills: shape recognition, cut and sticking, colouring, beginning reading and writing skills.
A guide is enclosed with the pack which includes ideas for card games.
These activities are a great springboard for creative work, inventing new rhyming fish.
This resource is part of a Teachers Telling Tales series inspired by the Hooray for Fish story and can also be purchased as part of a bundle.
Featuring the beloved little fish and his mum from the story by Lucy Cousins, these activities explore the opposites: big and little, fat and thin and happy and grumpy. This pack contains sets of picture, silhouette and word cards and simple worksheets with three levels of challenge.
There are greyscale versions of resources for those who want to save ink or include colouring as part of the activity.
Themes: opposites, fish, under the sea
Skills: shape recognition, cut and sticking, colouring, beginning reading and writing skills.
A guide is enclosed with the pack which includes ideas for card games.
This resource is part of a Teachers Telling Tales series inspired by the Hooray for Fish story and can also be purchased as part of a bundle.
Poems are a wonderful way to inspire a love of language in children. This pack features poems across a range of themes including animals, ocean, jungle, garden, farm and space and are great for enriching cross curricular topics. The activities inspired by the poems are designed for a range of abilities and learning needs with differentiation embedded. Activities include listen/read and draw/colour, checklists, card games, scavenger hunts, sequencing and matching.
In ‘Quack! said the Billy Goat’, the silly poem by Charles Causley, the animal sounds are all mixed up. The poem is fantastic for learning about farm animals, the sounds they make and using speech bubbles.
Children enjoy making the sounds and exploring how to write them.
This resource comes with a guide with suggestions for introducing the poem, shared reading ideas to involve children and follow up games.
There are animal silhouette pictures, animal names and speech bubbles with sounds. These are in the form of a picture for retelling the poem and to make cards for games and activities.
These worksheets feature a selection of poems from Commotion in the Ocean and Rumble in the Jungle by Giles Andreae. Students are given the rhyming words to choose from to fill the gaps. There is space for drawing when the work is complete. There are greyscale (black and white) versions for saving on ink.
These writing frames are designed to inspire young children to engage in purposeful recording through mark-making or emergent writing during their role play.
Topics: Personal Social Health Education, People who help us, Keeping healthy, parts of the body, numbers 1-5.
Skills development: speaking and listening, beginning writing.
Depending on their developmental stage, children may enjoy mark-making as they see fit, or they may follow the invitation to write names, crosses, ticks and circles.
The pictures are designed to prompt discussion and introduce and consolidate vocabulary.
The frame introduces the concept of forms and tables and includes numbers 1-5.
The writing frames can act as a guide for children role playing a visit to the doctor, prompting questions and responses such as “Where is the problem?” and “Take medicine three times a day.” The first time the frames are introduced, it would be good for an adult to model using them.
Context and Linked Resources
This resource pack was inspired by A Visit From the Nurse https://teacherstellingtales.com/a-visit-from-the-nurse/ an activity to help students overcome anxiety about visiting the school nurse (or other health care professionals).
In that lesson students observe how a nurse cares for us by demonstrating with soft toys in a range of familiar scenarios, e.g. “I bumped my head, I feel sick, I feel itchy”.
These are free to download here https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/a-visit-from-the-nurse-12174039.
As a follow up, children then explore being a carer through role play. This could be with other children (as a patient or carer) or with toys and dolls. The role play area could be set up as a health centre, hospital, veterinary clinic etc.
Includes
Greyscale versions, as you may need to print lots if they are popular! These can be made into a notebook (perhaps a prescription pad) or attached to a clipboard.
Colour versions could be laminated and used as examples displayed in the role play area, or used by the children with dry wipe pens.
An interactive story to learn about the sea turtle life cycle, natural and human threats. Children sit in a circle around a turtle nest (a hoop or mat) with 100 eggs.
As they listen to a story they take turns (going round the circle) to remove eggs as a predator or problem arises.
As the story continues, the remaining eggs are turned over to reveal hatchlings which in turn face more problems as they try to reach the sea. As juveniles in the sea there are yet more problems. How many will survive and return to the beach where they hatched to lay their own eggs? What will the beach be like when they have become an adult
Printables included in the pack:
Turtle eggs templates. Students can cut out the circles and draw their own hatchling on one side, (optional, if you prefer use the pre-made cards below).
Turtle egg and hatchling cards. Print and cut out. (Place face down for eggs and turn over for hatchlings.)
Story Scripts, 2 versions, ‘Take 5’ and ‘Against the Odds’.
Turtle problem picture cards.
Turtle problem word and picture cards.
Story Script Excerpt:
One moonlit night a green turtle heaved herself along the beach and dug a hole in the sand with her flippers.
She laid 100 eggs and took care to cover them again with sand to disguise the nest. Slowly, she made her way back to the sea where, exhausted, she slipped with relief back into the water as the sun began to rise.
Early the next morning, a dog roamed the beach and could smell where the turtle had been. She dug up part of the nest, ate five eggs and cracked five more which were eaten by ants.
Also included:
Ideas for activities using turtle problems cards. Maths (subtraction) story idea.
Related Resources:
For an active game on the threats to turtles, see the Teachers Telling Tales resource https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/turtles-in-danger-game-12237706
Turtles in Danger is an active chase and tag game suitable for primary / middle school children.
The game teaches children about sea turtle life cycles, natural and human threats, endangered animals and survival strategies.
The game can be played outdoors or indoors in a large space, a netball or basketball court is ideal.
There are two rounds, one where some children are hatchlings making their way to the sea while avoiding the other children who are threats. For the second round the remaining children are turtles trying to survive in the sea and return to the beach to lay eggs while avoiding threats. The game can be played again removing the human threats to see how this affects the survival rate.
This pack contains a guide to the game, a printable instruction sheet with pictures, labels and headbands to identify the children who are threats. There are 14 threats in total and they are colour-coded for dangers on the beach (sand colour) and for in the sea (blue). The labels and headbands have silhouette pictures for quick identification alongside the word and a short explanation of the threat.
Through playing the game students gain an understanding of why many reptiles and fish lay so many eggs in order to survive as a species. Through discussion they learn how the impact of extra pressure such as threats from humans can lead to a threat of extinction.
Related Resources:
An interactive story about turtle life cycles, turtles in Trouble, https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/turtles-in-trouble-an-interactive-story-12240371
A Sea Turtle quiz can be downloaded for free from https://teacherstellingtales.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Sea-Turtle-Quiz.pdf
Turtle book recommendations (fiction and non fiction) https://teacherstellingtales.com/turtle-tales-and-truths/