Teaching homophones for an entire lesson is pretty hard work and the children get so overloaded with words that they can’t remember them all. So I created four smaller 10-20 minute activities to use as lesson starters or fillers to give children the words in smaller doses. The first is a powerpoint, which would work best as a whole class with whiteboards. It asks if children know any different spellings for a given word and then uses pictures to support the teacher in giving definitions of the words. The second is a matching activity (matching homophones to their definitions) that pupils could complete in pairs. These words are trickier and may require the children to use dictionaries. The third activity is a gap fill, asking the children to choose the right homophone to complete the sentence. Again, dictionaries could be useful. The final activity asks pupils to write their own sentences to show that they understand the different meanings of homophones. There is a points element that could help make this competitive if that’s the way you class works! All activities meet NEW homophones; they are not repeated from previous activities.

I used this resource over two lessons. In the first lesson we used the colour coded question cards to teach indices with increasing degrees of difficulty. The cards are coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue and dark blue. With red having positive integer indices and orange having negative integer indices. As it works down through the colours, it introduces 1/2, -1/2, 3/4 and -3/4. There are five questions in each colour and the answers are available if you want to do it more as a matching exercise. In the second lesson, I provided pupils with the prompt sheet of the 6 processes covered last lesson. With this as support (no exercise books allowed), we used the same question cards again to complete a board game in pairs. Instructions for the game are included, with suggestions for differentiation too. It went down very well, hence listing it here.

If your children read The Week Junior, get them to read the President Trump article on p.2 in the 13th January 2018 edition. Follow it up with this quiz which is based on reading comprehension skills. 10 questions. Great for morning work or guided reading.

A matching activity where pupils need to match an algebraic expression e.g. xy into words e.g x multiplied by y.

Two sheets of word problems using a mixture of percentage finding skills.

This document has ideas for splitting The Highwayman into five sections with a follow up activity for each. These include a character sketch, a news report, a diary entry etc. An example of each of the follow up activities is given, written by one of my students, which you could share as model for your students. There is a basic outline of ideas on the document but you may wish to make your own powerpoints/extra resources.