I completed my PGCE at The Institute of Education in 2011, staying in London to start my career at a primary school in Hackney. I taught across KS2 in four years, while also co-ordinating Spanish and Science and receiving brilliant CPD training across a range of specialisms. In 2016 I moved to Lancashire, where I have been supply teacher for a range of local schools. I love creating engaging & purposeful resources to bring education to life and to give teachers their weekends back!
I completed my PGCE at The Institute of Education in 2011, staying in London to start my career at a primary school in Hackney. I taught across KS2 in four years, while also co-ordinating Spanish and Science and receiving brilliant CPD training across a range of specialisms. In 2016 I moved to Lancashire, where I have been supply teacher for a range of local schools. I love creating engaging & purposeful resources to bring education to life and to give teachers their weekends back!
Here is a lesson presentation and writing plan based on Teacher's TV 'spooky graveyard' short film. I enjoyed using this English/Literacy across all KS2 classes to develop children's descriptive writing (setting, atmosphere) in the form of a recount. This is especially good to use around Halloween time!
Resource includes lesson presentation (Notebook) and planning sheet.
These four lessons, designed for KS2, help children to understand light; different types, how it travels, what it is used for and its relationship with different materials. It involves a range of questions for children to brainstorm concepts and practical activities to test them. The objectives are as follows:
LI: To understand what light is and how it allows us to see
SC
I know what light is / how light is formed
I can identify whether a source of light is natural or man-made
I understand how movement of light into our eyes allows us to see
LI: To understand how light travels
SC
I can explain how light allows us to see
I can create an investigation to test a theory
I can predict the outcome of an investigation with reasoning
I can explain the steps of an investigation, including annotated diagrams
I can evaluate an investigation
I can use scientific vocabulary
LI: To sort and classify materials based on their transparency
SC
I can explain how shadows are formed
I can identify the properties of different materials
I can create an investigation to test a theory
I can predict the outcome of an investigation with reasoning
I can explain the steps of an investigation, including using annotated diagrams
I can evaluate an investigation
I can use scientific vocabulary
LI: To understand the properties of reflective materials
SC
I can identify the properties of materials
I can sort materials based on their reflective properties
I know different examples of where reflective materials are used in every day life
I can use clear diagrams and annotation to explain my ideas
I can use scientific language
This is one of my FAVOURITE lessons that can be taught across KS2; a short burst Literacy lesson to develop children's understanding of instruction texts using a chocolatey Easter theme!
I would always bring in a few small Easter eggs to this lesson. Using one in my modelling, I would play dumb and be an alien who had never seen an Easter egg before. I would ask the children what to do with it (i.e. to open and eat it) but did everything LITERALLY as they said, to make them appreciate the detail they needed to include in their instructions. Therefore, if they said "pull open the flaps" I would pull really hard and rip the box!! This would encourage them to include adverbs, like 'carefully', in their instructions.
The other Easter eggs would be on each table to help the children think through the different steps of opening and eating it, with the promise that they would be shared at lunch time of course!
This again helps to bring a purpose to the skill activity and engages children into the learning. Included is a flip notebook guiding you and the children through the lesson, and differentiated planning sheets. Appropriate for all KS2 and easily adapted for your own class' needs. Enjoy!
This resource can form a lesson, informing children about the importance of General Elections (like 2017) and why we have them.
This Powerpoint presentation allows children to learn about what 'government' is, how it is structured, what different major parties form our current government and what their current policies are (which I have sourced as independently as possible using various news outlets and party pages, barring any U-turns!) This then goes on to allow children to discuss the policies presented to them and to think about what matters / appeals to them the most, with the aim of encouraging freedom of independent thought and debate. Due to the complex wording of some policies, this resource would be most appropriate for UKS2 and KS3, and possibly LKS2 with detailed supporting verbal explanation of key issues provided by teaching staff, such as Brexit.
The class can then go on to hold a Polling Station to vote, with polling cards included in the resource pack, before votes being counted and the results being displayed on the slide in both percentage and pie chart form.
'The Playground' starts with the opening line: Everything stopped, everything a statue all around me. Frozen in time.
This lesson resource gets children to brainstorm and write the rest of the story using their own imagination, using the above opening line and a playground photograph as stimuli. The objective and success criteria are:
To write a complete story
Success Criteria:
* My story has a beginning, middle and end
* The events of my story flow and make sense
* I can engage the reader using description / feelings / varied sentences
The lesson presentation is in Smartboard format with detailed, engaging slides which promote talk partner discussion, teacher modelling, an independent white board task, clear objectives and plenary.
It can easily be adapted for different KS2 year groups and a different writing focus other than story structure, e.g. tense, sentence starters, grammar or vocabulary.
This resource is a class assembly that I did with my Year 3 and 4 classes about our cross-curricular topic for the term: Light.
To make the script I split the class into five groups, and gave each group a question to research with helpful bullet points. They went away and did this over a lesson, making the notes from which I made a class assembly script! The script can easily be adapted to change children's names or to add or take away parts. The script also includes visual activities or objects that groups can be showing to support their part of the assembly.
Group topics include:
What is light?
Sources of light
Darkness
Shadows
Reflections
It is designed to be an informative assembly, but fun and easily for an audience to follow. Enjoy!
A range of lessons that will bring your class’ WWII topic to life, learning about everything from why the war started and who was involved, to evacuation and how events were broadcast, to the social changes brought into effect from the conflict, from the role of women to economic and industrial changes.
This resource covers a whole half term of engaging lessons which I have used from years 3-5 to teach children about the human body, skeletons of both humans and animals, food groups and digestion. It includes questions to stimulate children’s ideas and understanding, links to various video clips and interactive websites to engage and support, and both group and independent tasks to allow children to demonstrate and challenge their understanding using the engaging resources that I have suggested (the cover picture for this resource being the display made using one of their favourite lesson activities!)
A pack of engaging Science lessons (made by a school Science co-ordinator) put together in one handy bundle linking to forces and motion.
I love making Science as interesting, informative and hands-on as possible for children in order to develop their understanding of various concepts.
This bundle made up a whole half term of Science in my teaching! It consists of several lessons focusing on rocks, then two linking lessons about fossils, and can (optionally) finish with evolution in the form of a lesson about inheritance.
Enjoy!
These seven lessons cover a fun and engaging half-term topic on Plants.
Learning objectives cover:
The parts of a plant
Photosynthesis
Plant lifecycle
Plant growth (soil)
Seed dispersal (reproduction)
The resource pack also includes ideas for an interactive and engaging classroom or corridor display!
A collection of six reading comprehension activities using real life newspaper articles. Each contains a copy of a newspaper article suitable for KS2 (new species of spider / Pangaea / blizzard / Remembrance Day / St Andrews Day/ Hedgehog preservation / Fifa Poppies) and questions that I have made myself to test their comprehension of the articles.
03/07/16 - UPDATED TO INCLUDE MOUNTAIN REPTILE ARTICLE
In this bundle are 11 of my favourite individual recount themes that I’ve used in my teaching career to develop children’s writing skills.
Each uses a brilliant animation or film resource to engage the children and each has a particular writing skill focus (e.g. description, tense, sentence structure).
I hope you enjoy using them as much as I do!
A bundle of Literacy recount lessons based on famous Christmas adverts from the last few years (e.g. John Lewis, Sainsburys).
Children really engage with these as they have seen them at home, because they are emotive or funny, and because they are so well made - like a mini film!
UPDATED 05/11/2020 TO INCLUDE THE 2019 WAITROSE JOHN LEWIS ADVERT