As I read through The Midnight Gang by David Walliams, I jotted down ideas of questions and activities to do with my pupils. Organised by chapter, this powerpoint has over 50 slides with questions that cover all aspects of reading comprehension. Some have short, instant answers and others could be expanded into a 20 minute class discussion. For the creative teacher, there are many ideas and questions that could easily be developed into something exciting and memorable for the children. Some activities have been indicated as potentially cross-curricular, including opportunities for art, geography, science, drama and debate. My purpose in adding this to TES is to provide teachers with a resource they could use in class with little or no preparation. Other teachers may not want to use it directly with the children but use it as a planning aid for their own lessons.

I used this resource over two lessons. In the first lesson we used the colour coded question cards to teach indices with increasing degrees of difficulty. The cards are coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue and dark blue. With red having positive integer indices and orange having negative integer indices. As it works down through the colours, it introduces 1/2, -1/2, 3/4 and -3/4. There are five questions in each colour and the answers are available if you want to do it more as a matching exercise. In the second lesson, I provided pupils with the prompt sheet of the 6 processes covered last lesson. With this as support (no exercise books allowed), we used the same question cards again to complete a board game in pairs. Instructions for the game are included, with suggestions for differentiation too. It went down very well, hence listing it here.

If your children read The Week Junior, get them to read the President Trump article on p.2 in the 13th January 2018 edition. Follow it up with this quiz which is based on reading comprehension skills. 10 questions. Great for morning work or guided reading.

A matching activity where pupils need to match an algebraic expression e.g. xy into words e.g x multiplied by y.

Two sheets of word problems using a mixture of percentage finding skills.

This document has ideas for splitting The Highwayman into five sections with a follow up activity for each. These include a character sketch, a news report, a diary entry etc. An example of each of the follow up activities is given, written by one of my students, which you could share as model for your students. There is a basic outline of ideas on the document but you may wish to make your own powerpoints/extra resources.