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 Macbeth-themed word search and crossword puzzles to help children to embed their knowledge of the Shakespeare tragedy. Available in PDF, Pages and Word formats!
All words link to the plot, including characters names, themes and places. Enjoy!
This resource is useful to use either at the start of a new term or in the middle of the academic year, to allow children to demonstrate what they believe to be their own personal academic achievements so far, and their targets.
It is presented using comic-book style speech bubbles to make it engaging. The top bubble is entitled: 'What I've Done Well So Far This Year' and the bottom: 'What I Would Like More Help With...'
I have used these in every year of my teaching, as it gives children the opportunity to demonstrate their pride, their aspirations, and the wording of 'help' rather than 'target' correctly implies that support will be given, rather than a goal being an independent task (and therefore to many, very difficult to achieve).
The resource is available in Pages, Microsoft Word and PDF format and in black and white for ease of printing and gives the children the opportunity to decorate if time allows! Enjoy!
This resource is part of a whole half term of engaging lessons which I have used from years 3-5 to teach the topic Humans including Animals. This lesson focuses on the human skeleton, and includes questions to stimulate children's ideas, links to online video clips to help develop and engage children's understanding, and suggested lesson activities.
The objective and success criteria are:
LI: To understand the human skeleton
Success Criteria
I know what the human skeleton is made out of
I can explain why humans have a skeleton
I can label different parts of the human skeleton
This resource is part of a whole half term of engaging lessons which I have used from years 3-5 to teach children about Animals including Humans. This lesson initially recaps children's understanding of human and animal skeletons, before focusing on developing their knowledge of food groups. It includes questions to stimulate children's ideas and understanding, various interactive links to engage and support, and suggested tasks to allow children to demonstrate and challenge their understanding.
The Lesson Objective and Success Criteria are:
LI: To know the different food groups
Success Criteria
I can explain what animals and humans need to stay healthy
I can name common food groups
I can name example foods in each group
This resource is part of a whole half term of engaging lessons which I have used from years 3-5 to teach children about Humans Including Animals. This resource starts by recapping children's understanding of the different food groups, before focusing on 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!)
The objective and success criteria for the lesson are:
LI: To understand the human digestive system
Success Criteria
I know what digestion is
I know why humans need to digest what they consume
I can place the digestive parts correctly in the body
I can label the basic parts of the digestive system
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 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!)
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 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?
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!
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 the lifecycle of a plant
The Success Criteria is:
I know that all living things eventually die
I know that living things need to reproduce
I can describe the lifecycle of a plant
I can name the key parts of the flower
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
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.
'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.
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
This resource is taken from my Zoom online courses during COVID. The pack consists of 2 x Powerpoint presentations/lessons and linking worksheets teaching all about Angles; from being able to name and identify them in lesson one, to understanding their sizes and calculating missing angles in lesson two. Suitable for Y5-6 with extra challenges included to push higher learners. As it’s from my courses my logo is included on the presentations and worksheets but you can obviously remove these to make them your own!
Click on my profile to find FREE lessons from my Zoom courses (see most recent uploads), so you can see their layout/content/flow before choosing to purchase this one.
This short burst English topic presents or revises different types of poetry before focusing on the topic of key Black History figures and creating nominal poems about them.
The objectives covering four days are:
Day 1: To compare different types of poetry
* I know the purpose of poetry
* I can identify the structure of different poems
* I can identify use of description in different poems
* I can explain how a poem makes me feel
Day 2: To be able to perform poetry
Success Criteria:
* I can compare how authors read poetry
* I can speak confidently and clearly
* I can use punctuation to identify the flow of a poem
* I can emphasis key words in a poem
Day 3: To be able to plan the content of a poem
Success Criteria:
* I can research key personal information about an individual
* I can find out why they became a key Black History figure
* I can brainstorm adjectives that describe their personality
* I can brainstorm adjectives that describe their appearance
Challenge: I can predict the feelings of an individual at key points during their life
Day 4: To be able to write a nominal poem
Success Criteria:
* I can write the first letters of the persons name down the left margin
* I know the first word for each line starts with the given letter
* My poem tells the reader why the person is celebrated during Black History Month
* I can include descriptive language to make my poem emotive
This resource pack contains the Notebook presentation for the four days, which includes examples of all types of poetry, links to poetry being performed, talk partner questions, opportunities to take notes from children's feedback and task outlines for each lesson, along with worksheets for the third and fourth lessons and linking photographs.
Suitable for KS2 and great for Black History Month or a general poetry topic.
After years and years of finding the monitoring of children's progress in subjects such as Science, PE and ICT to be difficult both in terms of practicality and time, I was made Science coordinator at my school, and therefore had the opportunity to face the conundrum head on. I was determined, especially after "assessment without levels" came in, to find a more time manageable, yet effective and clear, method of tracking pupils progress outside of the big three.
Therefore I came up with this; an easily adaptable tracking sheet which allows teachers for each class to simply input their register and planned Science objectives for the half term. Tracking then works like a traffic-light system - if under the first objective some children displayed really good or even advanced understanding, I put a red dot in the first column by their name. If some children really took to the learning well and came away with a good understanding from the lesson, I gave them a green dot to show they were on track. And if children seemed to struggle with an objective and didn't come away with a clear understanding, I gave them a yellow dot. (FYI - this was tracked discreetly during and after the lesson).
ADDITIONALLY - during the next lesson, I would look to start by recapping from the previous week's objective, targeting children on yellow and green with my questioning. If a child I had previously dotted yellow seemed to show a good recollection of key ideas and facts then I would add a green dot next to their original yellow dot to override it.
All the above instructions are at the top of the tracking sheet. Additionally, this assessment tool allows teachers to monitor what Science objectives they have taught through the year, to ensure expected coverage, and can help coordinators ensure that classes across the school have good coverage of the curriculum and are not repeating the same topics unnecessarily.