How can outreach work effectively engage hard-to-reach community members? Partnership working and forward thinking has been successful in breaking down barriers to participation, as Nazia Hussain, project manager for Keighley extended schools cluster in Bradford, explains
How would you feel about a student critiquing your teaching style and lesson plans? Involving students in the teaching and learning process can promote agendas relating to student voice, believes Trevor Brittain
How can we encourage and develop young writers? Carol Archer describes an ambitious project designed to extend creativity and enable children to evaluate their own narrative and poetry
Staff at Park View Community School, Chester-Le-Street, describe how introducing a competence-based curriculum has enabled students and teachers to begin a learning journey
How can the process of developing thinking skills be put into practice? A glimpse into the environment within a day nursery in south-east England shows how
Early Years Update focuses on the importance of well being, as part of their range of practical ideas to underpin the information in the Early Years Foundation Stage Principles into Practice cards
Have you taken ownership of your curriculum yet? David Morley examines how to break free, particularly with themed creative events
Early years practitioners have used ICT to support young children’s learning in diverse ways, writes Julie Steer
Early Years Update focuses on the importance of inclusion, as part of their range of practical ideas to underpin the information in the Early Years Foundation Stage Principles into Practice cards
Jan White provides a range of practical ideas for creating enabling outdoor environments that support young children’s health, wellbeing, development and learning
Early Years Update focuses on development and learning as part of their range of practical ideas to underpin the information in the Early Years Foundation Stage Principles into Practice cards
Key stage 2 lesson plans for exploring the Beijing Olympics to meet learning objectives in geography and citizenship, provided by Caroline Coxon
Storyteller Taffy Thomas provides games and activities to stimulate children’s and young people’s capacity to tell stories
Peter Leyland describes how he used TASC to teach his Year 6 class about measuring time
Angela Youngman has found some exciting new approaches to the teaching of maths
In this numeracy lesson plan Paul Ainsworth describes how learning about probability can provide excellent opportunities for speaking and listening and incorporate plenty of challenge for the most able
Mandi Horwood describes how a project to investigate how students saw their learning and how they can have a say in it revealed the vital contribution that they have to make
John Senior highlights the importance of helping learners to have fun with numbers and develop positive attitudes towards mathematics
What if we all looked the same? This was just one of the topics used to get pupils thinking at a competitive event organised by Luton LEA and attended by Peter Leyland
Gross motor skills are the movements of the large muscles of the body. These activities will help to develop and improve gross motor skills.
Pragmatics refers to the ability to communicate in social situations. These classroom activities will help all children to develop social communication skills.
These classroom activities can help develop grammar skills, particularly syntax and morphology
This science lesson plan for Key Stage 2 works on a number of levels, writes Caroline Coxon
Jo Smith suggests practical ways of building challenge into every lesson
A murder investigation, crisis in outer space and stick insects! Peter Leyland reports on a chemistry competition that really gets pupils thinking
The gentoo penguins of Antarctica love to swim in sub-zero temperatures…and they keep warm on land by ‘huddling’
Our new blogger Libby Reid shares the results of her websearch for nativity ideas
How can teachers ensure that there is appropriate challenge for G&T pupils in every lesson? In the first of a series of lessons plans, Caroline Coxon provides some ideas
Richard Gould describes the approach at Villiers Park Educational Trust
Staging a ‘whodunit’ can provide great scope for enrichment, says G&T consultant Bob Cox.
Maggie Parker-Heys urges practitioners to appreciate the skills required to form even the simplest letters.
Jenny Fox Eades writes about the Celebrating Strengths project, which uses the Christmas story to explore emotions around hope and spirituality
Any primary school teachers out there with workshop ideas? I’m organising a few Antarctica mornings for local primaries and I’m trying to work out what to do.
This activity is about values, language, futurology, ethics and belonging.
A fun activity to encourage extension and development of vocabulary.
Design today for tomorrow: this activity looks at an art movement as a starting point for designing and making a product.
Semantic knowledge is the ability to understand narrative. This includes the ability to understand the meanings of words in different contexts, as well as a knowledge of the meaning of relationships between words. The activities listed here will help develop semantic knowledge.
Word finding is the ability to access vocabulary from the long-term memory. These activities can help develop word finding skills and can be used in lessons for the benefit of all pupils.
Listening is the ability to attend to sounds across a range of stimuli. Pupils with listening and attention difficulties have one of two problems…
Spatial awareness is the ability to be aware of oneself in space. Awareness of spatial relationships is the ability to see two or more objects in relation to each other and to oneself. These activities will help develop spatial awareness skills and can be used in lessons for the benefit of all pupils
Visual comprehension is the ability to listen to information that has been given orally, then remember it, understand it and use the information across a range of tasks. These activities can help develop skills in this area, and can be incorporated into lessons for the benefit of all pupils.
Visual perception is the ability to recognise, interpret and organise visual images. The activities listed here will help develop visual perception skills and can be incorporated into lessons to benefit all pupils.
This series of classroom activities will be useful for SENCOs, teachers, assistants and mentors. Each page focuses on a different skill set – from spatial awareness to visual discrimination to semantic knowledge
Auditory memory is the ability to recall information that has been given orally. The activities listed here can help develop auditory memory and can be incorporated into lessons for the benefit of all pupils.
Visual memory is the ability to recall information that has been presented visually. The activities listed here can help develop visual memory and can be incorporated into a lesson for the benefit of all pupils.
Visual discrimination is the ability to recognise similarities and differences between visual images. The activities listed here can help develop visual discrimination skills and can be used in lessons to benefit all children.
Phonological awareness is the ability to be aware of sounds within words and to be able to break down words into syllables and into phonemes. The activities listed here can help develop phonological awareness and can be used in lessons for the benefit of all children.
Auditory discrimination is the ability to detect similarities and differences when listening to sounds. The activities listed here can be used to strengthen auditory discrimination skills and can be incorporated into a lesson to benefit all children.
Educational consultant Mike Fleetham shares some interesting ideas about choosing books and looks at some practical ideas for using stories to develop children’s thinking.
This project focused on integrating Fair Trade purchasing throughout the school and raising pupil and staff awareness of global issues.
To mark Martin Luther King day, students wrote poems on social responsibility themes.
Our Global Citizenship Day was a June event for Year 8s as a follow up to the unit of work they had done on Global Citizenship earlier in the year.
The Trading Game is part of a proactive approach towards Citizenship, including a new Citizenship department and a Human Rights group.
Our multi-cultural arts day was aimed at Year 7 students and was one of a programme of stop days around global citizenship in our school.
Fair trade day formed part of a whole school curriculum enrichment programme, and linked to the Citizenship scheme of work, which explores diversity and human rights in a local, national and global context.
An activity played in a circle, as a kind of visual Chinese Whispers; and an appreciation / observation activity