*This took me hours to make and I always share my resources for free. However, if you have found this useful and would consider chucking a book my way (I’m trying to collect class sets for my class), I’d really appreciate it! My Amazon wishlist is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/36JJE26YLGHYC?ref_=wl_share * I’m a big advocate of whole-class reading over the carousel method of guided reading! However this planning could also be used with a small guided reading group. This is a plan for roughly 6 weeks’ worth of reading lessons (23 sessions - provided you do at least 4 a week. Each session lasts about 30-40 mins). It’s definitely aimed towards Year 6, but could be adapted for a Year 5 class. I have used question starters taken from the 2016 sample SATs paper and real SATs paper to prepare children for the new reading curriculum. Each week (4 sessions) is based around a different type of question - retrieval, choice, interpret, vocabulary and 3-mark questions. I’ve included a “3-mark question” in some of the sessions and have based my example answers round the ‘APE’ (answer, prove, explain) style structure. ***It has now become apparent that ‘APE’ is far from a useful method to answer 3-mark SATs style questions. However, I’m going to keep them in the resource as I still think it’s a good way to develop children’s written responses in general. Rhoda Wilson has written an excellent blog here that explains how to write 3-mark responses for SATs: https://misswilsonsays.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/pee-off/ ***

The lesson plan is self explanatory - additional resources needed are 'coins&' - basically a handful of coordinates. I did this as an interview lesson so put a lot of time in the resources (had gold coins in coin bags) but it needn&';t be that fussy. The kids loved the concept of treasure hunting. I did this with year 3 but it could easily be done with year 2.

Maaria Khan (@MissKhan__) and I wanted to create some fun, silly tasks to mark SATs week this year. Monday: spelling (already created by Matt Brown - @mrbrownteach) - silly words; grammar - mark the teacher’s errors (created by me) Tuesday: reading - silly questions based on an extract about children’s manners and etiquette in the 1950s (created by me) Wednesday: arithmetic - an arithmetic treasure hunt (created for use during a local walk but could be adapted to be used around the house) (created by Maaria) Thursday: reasoning - silly maths word problems (created by Maaria) It’s all just supposed to be a bit of fun. Feel free to adapt as much or as little as you like!

*This took me hours to make and I always share my resources for free. However, if you have found this useful and would consider chucking a book my way (I’m trying to collect class sets for my class), I’d really appreciate it! My Amazon wishlist is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/36JJE26YLGHYC?ref_=wl_share * I’m a big advocate of whole-class reading over the carousel method of guided reading! However this planning could also be used with a small guided reading group. This is a plan for roughly 6 weeks’ worth of reading lessons (24 sessions - provided you do at least 4 a week. Each session lasts about 30-40 mins). It’s definitely aimed towards Year 6, but could be adapted for a Year 5 class. I have used question starters taken from the 2016 sample SATs paper and real SATs paper to prepare children for the new reading curriculum. I’ve included a “3-mark question” in most of the sessions as a ‘challenge’, and based my example answers round the ‘PEE’ style structure. The accompanying notebook can be used during the lessons so the questions can be displayed on the board for children to see - everything should be there for you! :) ***It has now become apparent that ‘PEE’ is far from a useful method to answer 3-mark SATs style questions. However, I’m going to keep them in the resource as I still think it’s a good way to develop children’s written responses in general. Rhoda Wilson has written an excellent blog here that explains how to write 3-mark responses for SATs: https://misswilsonsays.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/pee-off/ ***

Ashley Booth (@MrBoothY6 on Twitter) started this brilliant idea by asking authors on Twitter why they think children should read - he has collated all of the responses here (there are LOADS!): https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/authors-reasons-to-read-11702156 I chose a mere 39 of those and jazzed it up a little for a display.

Used this for my (successful!) interview lesson with a mixed ability class of year 4s. Lesson plan is self explanatory. Introduces concept step by step, includes pupil voice (children can self-differentiate by choosing the worksheets - I photocopied the 'support&' activity onto green and the &';challenge' activity onto yellow). Kids had a lot of fun being &'detectives&';.

Some of my mixed 3/4 class struggled with finding fractions where the numerator was higher than 1 (e.g. 2/3 of 15). They also really struggled with putting them in word problems! I created these step by step worksheets so children could see the progression, e.g. 1/3 of 15 is? 2/3 of 15 is? I have 15 sweets and I eat 2/3 of them. How many do I eat?

I highly recommend the sesame street video about Hanukkah - brilliant! Then run through the PowerPoint before children complete the Menorah activity in pairs - photocopy the blank Menorah onto A3. Children must cut up the candles, on which are true or false statements about Hanukkah. They put them on one side of the Menorah depending on whether they are true or false. Challenge pupils to correct the false statements.

Children get the chance to be 'detectives' by using inversion to complete the subtraction problems with the first number missing to work out the letters to crack the code! I have created a slightly more difficult version of the same activity using higher numbers.

Differentiated three ways. This worked well for the HA year 3s and LA-MA year 4s in my mixed year 3/4 maths group. Could be used for lower ability 5/6s though.

I made a lesson for my observation with top set year 6 - I have roughly 9 children I'll be expecting to reach the Greater Depth standard for writing by June. The lesson plan is basically the smart notebook - it walks you through the lesson step by step. The children start by watching a BBC interview and analysing the differences in the spoken English. After selecting features of formal/informal speech, the children then use what they've learnt to annotate a written conversation between a reporter and a witness to a burglary. As their consolidation activity, the children continue a narrative which includes dialogue between a head-teacher, a student and his mother. To end the lesson, share the children's work (under a visualiser if possible? or in pairs) and ask others to peer-assess - who has used what techniques, where and why?

These aren't my own comprehension questions - I copied them in from the accompanying book, but I labelled each question with its corresponding Assessment Focus and put them into a user-friendly plan.

I compiled this list of websites for primary trainees and NQTs to help with their planning (although I know I’ll find it useful myself having not heard of half of them!) They’re all either free or very cheap.

Students must round 2- and 3-digit numbers to the nearest 10 to estimate the answers to the word problems. Appropriate for HA year 3s and upwards.

This is great for consolidating mental maths skills for addition and subtraction. Compensating: when a number can be rounded to the nearest 10 easily, add or subtract the nearest 10 and then take-away/add back what you previously compensated Bridging: when you subtract two numbers that are close together, count on from the lowest one Number bonds: when you add two numbers, see if the units make a number bond to 10

26 slides of 9 letter words for children to unscramble - probably more suited to upper KS2 and KS3. (On the slides, RT = raffle tickets - obviously this can be edited out.) I use these in our 20 minute morning registration slot to keep the children occupied. (For your information, each 9 letter words begins with a different letter of the alphabet - for example, Slide 1's answer begins with an A, Slide 2&'s with a B, Slide 3&';s with a C... etc)

In this activity, the children become shopkeepers - they must work out how to make/save the most money by buying the fruit they need from the cheapest shop. I've been using this with my Level 6 Year 6 group, but would definitely work well in KS3. See resources for more details.

Spellings, particularly the retention of spellings, are a particular issue in our school - it has been holding many children back from achieving Expected Standard in their writing. We are trying to combat this! I have made 9 step challenges that would span from years 1-6. Each step has its own ‘sub-steps’ – this is because there are a lot of words to get through, but each sub-step isn’t necessarily more difficult than the previous one as all the words from one step are the same level of difficulty (just split into lists of 20). I've attached a file called "Step Challenges - word origins" which explains where I got the words from (clue: the National Curriculum!) and how I'd expect the children to work through them (KS1 = steps 1-4, KS2 = steps 5-9). Every list has 20 words in it, so each step (apart from Steps 4 and 9) consists of 100 words in total. Ideally, SCs would take place weekly. In my experience, children may often get high marks in the usual weekly spelling tests (where all words follow a certain rule) but then, a few weeks later, forget how to spell them, as retention is such an issue. It would still be beneficial to teach a spelling rule a week, which may apply to some of the words in their step challenge, but not all. The 20 words in each list do not follow a rule for this reason. Children need to get 20/20 before moving on to the next sub-step. A reward for passing a ‘sub-step’ could be house points, or something relevant to that age group/your school. Once they’ve passed all sub-steps (a-e), they then need to pass a ‘Challenge’ to have passed the whole step. The challenge would be 20 words randomly picked from the whole 100 on that step – if the children achieve 18 or above out of 20 on these, they then pass that whole step and are awarded a certificate! (We have created one personalised for our school.) Children’s progress could be tracked on Excel – I’ve made a grid that could be useful for this (see attached). This could either be updated on the computer or printed off.

Four ‘levels’ - answers included!

I specialised in music during my teacher training and the new curriculum was published during my final year at university. As part of a curriculum design project, we had to create progression documents for music in line with the new curriculum from EYFS to Year 6 for both the 6 musical aspects (composition, instruments, improvisation, singing, notation and history) and the 7 musical dimensions (structure, pitch, rhythm, timbre, texture, dynamics and tempo). I would consider these written for a music specialist. They will not necessarily fit into an existing scheme (such as Charanga) so if your school uses one of these, please be aware that these documents will need adapting!

Differentiated worksheets with word problems using children's knowledge of finding fractions of numbers.