Use this with a small group or a whole class to revise some of the basic skills on the KS2 SATs Maths Paper 1: Arithmetic. It is designed to be a quiz quick that more able pupils should be able to do in their heads and less able pupils should be able to do in a reasonable amount of time on a whiteboard. The questions are in a fairly random order, although I have often made 3 or 4 consecutive questions follow the same topic so the children get a chance to practise and get into a topic before the next topic comes along. I have also subtly colour-coded the questions so the teacher can instantly see the level of difficulty: 3 shades of blue, with the lightest representing easier questions and the darker shade representing the hardest questions. (This shading is just a rough idea - you may disagree with paritcular questions and want to change the shade! Also note that the shading is relative within the topic: the hardest of the x1000 questions is still much easier than finding 87% of a number!) This resource could be used so flexibly as a gap-filler e.g. when you’ve got a spare few minutes at the end of the day or before assembly, as a lesson where you can try questions and then discuss mental methods across the class, or as a competitive quiz with teams or individuals, buzzer rounds and speed rounds. It can be saved for year after year too! There are approx 200 questions covering the following topics: adding and subtracting TU and TU: 26 + 63 and 53 – 21 adding on a multiple of 10, 100 and 1000: 3852 + 20 and 4284 + 3000 multiplying multiples of 10, 100 and 1000: 30 x 400 dividing multiples of 10, 100 and 1000: 450 ÷ 9 adding and subtracting decimals: 1 – 0.43 and 2 + 0.67 adding and subtracting 99 x ÷ 10 100 1000 x ÷ fractions % of numbers fractions of numbers 32 + 10 BODMAS Answers included on a separate powerpoint. I have checked them but please let me know if you find any errors so I can amend immediately.

Teaching homophones for an entire lesson is pretty hard work and the children get so overloaded with words that they can’t remember them all. So I created four smaller 10-20 minute activities to use as lesson starters or fillers to give children the words in smaller doses. The first is a powerpoint, which would work best as a whole class with whiteboards. It asks if children know any different spellings for a given word and then uses pictures to support the teacher in giving definitions of the words. The second is a matching activity (matching homophones to their definitions) that pupils could complete in pairs. These words are trickier and may require the children to use dictionaries. The third activity is a gap fill, asking the children to choose the right homophone to complete the sentence. Again, dictionaries could be useful. The final activity asks pupils to write their own sentences to show that they understand the different meanings of homophones. There is a points element that could help make this competitive if that’s the way you class works! All activities meet NEW homophones; they are not repeated from previous activities.

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.

Some basic pictures with words underneath so that children can fill in the correct vowel sound. I had taught ‘ar’ in a recent lesson and er/ir/ur in this lesson, so I wanted something that would practise current learning but also revise previous learning.

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.