Tag: education
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#1 Meditation & Calm
It seemed only right to begin with an activity to help create calm. Who knows, meditation may even become a regular practice in your household as most of us are forced to ‘hit the pause button’ for a while… This first activity will explore the practice of meditation – a practice which is at the…
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Daily English Activities for Homeschooling
As we all try to do our bit to help children who will be learning from home for the foreseeable future, I would like to announce that I will be posting a daily English activity online from Monday to Friday, starting today. I am an experienced primary school teacher (KS2) with a specialism in English.…
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Online English Tools for Home Learning
In times like these, sharing teaching resources with each other is more important than ever! Below is a list of 10 useful (and FREE) online resources for teaching English, which may prove useful in the coming weeks during school closures. Please do feel free to share with teachers, colleagues and parents… 1) CLPE’s PoetryLine is…
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How I do it: Let’s Write for Pleasure!
I, like many others, have been a huge advocate of Reading for Pleasure for many years now, but Writing for Pleasure seems to have slipped the net. We depend on it as the largest indicator of success and progress in learning, yet it doesn’t quite receive the same limelight that reading does. Writing in primary…
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The Literacy Calendar 2019-2020
Last year, I created a Literacy Calendar – something I’d wanted to sink my teeth into for a long time. I’ve always felt it would be one of those things that’s incredibly useful to have and to share with staff, yet something we rarely have time to research or create! It proved so popular amongst…
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Writing Rivers
I originally saw Jon Biddle‘s excellent Reading Rivers report on the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure website. It stems from an idea originally explored by Pamela Burnard (2002) whereby the ‘river’ was used as a reflective tool to represent key musical experiences. It was then further explored by Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges (2010) with secondary readers and…
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Inspiring Reading & Writing: Launching a Magazine
If your school does not yet have its own magazine or newspaper, founding one can be an amazing opportunity to encourage reading and writing across the whole school community. It’s a fantastic way to get kids into journalistic writing, generating their own ideas and taking ownership of a producing a publication. Starting from scratch can…
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Book Clubs for Teachers: Widening reading repertoires
I had known for some time that my knowledge of children’s books was a weak area and when I came cross the Open University’s self-review document for teachers whilst scrolling through twitter one day, I thought, ‘why not?’ I clicked on the link and started dutifully answering the questions. It was worse than I thought. I was lured…
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Encourage creativity, set writing free
‘A love of writing can unlock children’s imaginations, aspirations and academic potential. Yet half of school children tell us they don’t enjoy writing because they struggle with spelling, punctuation, and knowing what to write.’ Jonathan Douglas, Director of the National Literacy Trust Half of children in the UK don’t enjoy writing. Half. I’ve often asked…
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The Day War Came
The Day War Came by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb Published by Walker Book, £10 (£1 from each copy sold donated to Help Refugees) Recommended Key Stages: 1 or 2 Year Group: 3+ In 2016, our own government refused to allow 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees to enter the UK. Around the same time, Nicola…
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Writing for Pleasure Conference
On Friday 13th July, I attended the UKLA’s first ever Writing for Pleasure Conference, hosted at Canterbury Christ Church University. As a huge advocate of writing for and with pleasure, I wanted to find out more about what this might look like in the classroom. The conference featured an introductory talk from Tracy Parvin (UK Literacy Association President),…
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Teachers’ Reading for Pleasure ‘Book Clubs’
To teach reading and writing effectively and enthusiastically, we must be keen readers and writers ourselves. With this in mind, I was looking for opportunities to develop myself as a reader and, through twitter, I stumbled upon the Open University and UKLA Teachers’ Reading Groups. Initially, I thought it was simply a book club led…
Literacy with Miss P 