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!
A simple but fun Chinese New Year-themed word search and crossword puzzles to help children to embed their knowledge of the festival. Available in PDF format.
Words featured in both puzzles are: DOG, DRAGON, FESTIVAL, GOAT, HORSE, LANTERN, LUNAR, MONKEY, PIG, RABBIT, RAT, ROOSTER, SNAKE, SPRING, TIGER
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!
This lesson uses brainstorming, questioning, exploration and matching to challenge the objective: To understand how the soil helps plants to grow
The Success Criteria is:
I know the function of plant roots
I know why soil is a good place for plants to grow
I can describe the nutrients found in soils
Included is extensive flip pages helping children to understand the photosynthesis process and lesson activities to display their understanding.
This lesson links with others in my resource shop, as a whole topic bundle about Plants.
This is a five-lesson half-term resource on the cross-curricular topic, Earth Matters. Containing a Notebook flip and a worksheet, the KS2-suitable resource develops children's understanding of biomes and eco-systems in a range of engaging lessons, including research project, making a poster, making a 'dome biome' and making group powerpoint presentations which could then be used in a class assembly.
The Learning Intentions/Objectives over the five lessons are:
1) To understand the features of biomes
2) To understand the interdependency of organisms in a biome
3) + 4) To understand that eco-systems are delicate / To know about global environmental problems and solutions
5) To know about global environmental problems and solutions / To prepare a presentation about a topic
When developing my children's comprehension skills, I don't like using photocopies from text books and meaningless expectancy sheets. I prefer to use purposeful, educational and REAL LIFE examples to engage and inform them, while still challenging them and looking for those reading skills.
Therefore a lot of my comprehension challenges are based around interesting newspaper articles. In this example, taken from the BBC News website in April 2017, a village in the South West of England has declared itself as being 'hedgehog-friendly' in a bid to stop numbers falling.
Included in this pack is a copy of the article and linking comprehension questions suitable for KS2.
Enjoy!
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 resource helps children to consider the progression of time chronologically and the duration of different events. The lesson objective is to be able to create a daily routine using time facts
Success Criteria:
* I can order events chronologically
* I can use vocabulary linked to the time of day
* I can identify what time activities start and end
* I represent times on an analogue clock
Challenge: I can state how long activities last
The lesson starts with a discussion about what key events would be included in a daily routine, with children thinking of their own personal examples. It then moves on to a teacher model of how time would be considered in a daily routine, from the start and end times to knowing the approximate duration of activities (i.e. they would know that brushing your teeth takes 5 minutes rather than 50 minutes).
Children then independently create their own daily routine plan on the worksheet provided, which has been differentiated to challenge different learners.
This lesson would suit KS1 and LKS2 classes and is easily adaptable. Enjoy!
This resource gets children to independently research information about Celtic traditions using ICT.
The worksheet gets the children to visit a BBC website and research the answers to nine questions (three examples shown) with space below each to make notes:
1. How many years before Jesus Christ did the Celts live in Britain?
2. Where do the Celts live today in Europe?
3. What were Celtic roundhouses made of?
This lesson uses brainstorming, questioning, exploration and matching to challenge the objective: To understand that plants make food in their leaves
The Success Criteria is:
I know the seven life processes
I can explain why plants have leaves
I know what the leaves of a plant need to make food
I can label a diagram to explain this process
Included is extensive flip pages helping children to understand the photosynthesis process and lesson activities to display their understanding.
This lesson links with others in my resource shop, as a whole topic bundle about Plants.
This lesson uses brainstorming, questioning, exploration and matching to follow the objective: To understand the different parts of plants
The Success Criteria is as follows:
I can name the main parts of a plant
I can label the main parts of a plant
I can describe the functions of plant parts
Included is a page listing different accessible and engaging activity ideas (as the items I used are copyrighted).
This lesson links with others in my resource shop, as a topic bundle about Plants.
This lesson (or two lessons if you want to make it really well!) allows your class to make an engaging and stimulating display about their Plants topic.
Included is photographs of the display I completed with my Year 3 class, a flip of different group activities and clip art which can optionally be used.
This lesson links with others in my resource shop, as a whole topic bundle about Plants.
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.
I made this resource based on the 2017 John Lewis Christmas advert. It is about a little boy who struggles to sleep at night, scared that in the dark, a monster lives under his bed. Eventually, the boy becomes friend with the monster, but it continues to affect his sleeping, leaving him tired during the day. For Christmas, he gets a special present to help him sleep well at night, content that his monster friend, Moz, will be sleeping too.
It's got great graphics to draw in the viewer and a story arc that many children can relate to.
I wanted to use this advert, not only because Christmas adverts continue to grow in quality and popularity, with children finding them very entertaining and engaging, but also to develop children's description, focusing in this instant on character emotions. Included is a story plan for children to note their ideas and a Notebook presentation for teaching the lesson. This can easily be adapted to develop a different Literacy skill or to suit a particular year group.
Enjoy! And also see other Literacy recount lessons inspired by Christmas adverts in my TES shop!
13/11/17 - UPDATE to include a direct link to the video in the presentation
This resource is the perfect ending to this half termly topic 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. This particular lessons gets children to brainstorm what they have learnt about animals and humans since the start of the topic helpfully allowing you assess their understanding.
The lesson objectives and success criteria include:
LI: To be able to produce facts that state my new understanding
LI: To be able to answer questions to demonstrate my new understanding
Success Criteria
I can state what I have learnt about a given topic
I can try to answer questions I previously asked using my new learning
This lesson would be a good introduction to direction in either Geography or Maths. It introduces what a compass is and what it is used for, before focusing on NESW and the points in between. This could easily be demonstrated in the classroom by putting up NESW posters on each wall of your classroom, but my lesson uses a map of the counties of England to develop compass skills and direction. This is first modelled by the teacher, e.g. Cumbria is NW of North Yorkshire using the Notebook presentation, before the children have a go themselves, completing either missing compass directions or places in each statement. Suitable for KS2. Enjoy!