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.

Some basic pictures with words underneath so that children can fill in the correct vowel sound. I had taught ‘ar’ in a recent lesson and er/ir/ur in this lesson, so I wanted something that would practise current learning but also revise previous learning.

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.

Aimed at upper KS2 or KS3 readers, this resource provides a way to help students engage with the text. With 25 slides (one per chapter), it helps teachers to plan discussions and activities relating to each chapter. Some may be questions you want to ask along the way as you are reading as a class (or alternatively could be modified into comprehension task questions); other activities could be developed into a whole lesson (e.g. a piece of writing or a class debate). There are a variety of tasks and questions around different topics and reading skills: formal/informal language standard/non-standard English predictions looking up vocabulary author’s language choices structural techniques such as short sentences and use of repetition building up suspense author’s awareness of the reader author’s purpose in writing This resource also aims to engage pupils in the text through: drawing characters and settings comparing what is recorded in the book with their own experiences generating deeper discussion about schools, traditions and punishments encouraging students to look up things on the internet: maps, photos, youtube clips

As I read through The Midnight Gang by David Walliams, I jotted down ideas of questions and activities to do with my pupils. Organised by chapter, this powerpoint has over 50 slides with questions that cover all aspects of reading comprehension. Some have short, instant answers and others could be expanded into a 20 minute class discussion. For the creative teacher, there are many ideas and questions that could easily be developed into something exciting and memorable for the children. Some activities have been indicated as potentially cross-curricular, including opportunities for art, geography, science, drama and debate. My purpose in adding this to TES is to provide teachers with a resource they could use in class with little or no preparation. Other teachers may not want to use it directly with the children but use it as a planning aid for their own lessons.

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.

Use this with a small group or a whole class to revise some of the basic skills on the KS2 SATs Maths Paper 1: Arithmetic. It is designed to be a quiz quick that more able pupils should be able to do in their heads and less able pupils should be able to do in a reasonable amount of time on a whiteboard. The questions are in a fairly random order, although I have often made 3 or 4 consecutive questions follow the same topic so the children get a chance to practise and get into a topic before the next topic comes along. I have also subtly colour-coded the questions so the teacher can instantly see the level of difficulty: 3 shades of blue, with the lightest representing easier questions and the darker shade representing the hardest questions. (This shading is just a rough idea - you may disagree with paritcular questions and want to change the shade! Also note that the shading is relative within the topic: the hardest of the x1000 questions is still much easier than finding 87% of a number!) This resource could be used so flexibly as a gap-filler e.g. when you’ve got a spare few minutes at the end of the day or before assembly, as a lesson where you can try questions and then discuss mental methods across the class, or as a competitive quiz with teams or individuals, buzzer rounds and speed rounds. It can be saved for year after year too! There are approx 200 questions covering the following topics: adding and subtracting TU and TU: 26 + 63 and 53 – 21 adding on a multiple of 10, 100 and 1000: 3852 + 20 and 4284 + 3000 multiplying multiples of 10, 100 and 1000: 30 x 400 dividing multiples of 10, 100 and 1000: 450 ÷ 9 adding and subtracting decimals: 1 – 0.43 and 2 + 0.67 adding and subtracting 99 x ÷ 10 100 1000 x ÷ fractions % of numbers fractions of numbers 32 + 10 BODMAS Answers included on a separate powerpoint. I have checked them but please let me know if you find any errors so I can amend immediately.

I made this resource when working with some weaker Year 6s who got in a massive muddle with converting cm, m and km. They couldn’t remember what to times and divide by, whether they were shifting the digits or decimal point (because different teachers had taught them differently!) or which way they were shifting things. So this powerpoint/lesson avoids that method and uses the lining up method where they need to write down the conversion, then the question underneath and spot where 0s and decimal points need to go. E.g.: 1000m = 1.000km 0751m = 0.751km The lesson starts with some warming up of place value and lining up decimal numbers. It then moves on to look at units of measure and asks children to estimate some lengths, weights and volumes. (It seemed that my group had no idea what a ‘reasonable’ answer was, as they had no context of distance or weight.) The powerpoint explains how to line up to find the answer. Questions are provided and slides 26-29 should be printed for the independent worksheet. All answers provided. I appreciate children need to know the multiplying and dividing method for converting measure (see my other resources). This was a much-needed ‘quick-fix’ for SATs preparation. Please do make sure you go over the standard method with your class at a later date!

This four page booklet begins with an explanation of the terms ‘edges’, ‘faces’ and ‘vertices’ and then tests this knowledge using three basic 3D shapes. The inside of the booklet has two tables and images of prisms and pyramids. It requires the pupil to find the number of edges, faces and vertices for ten of these shapes. It also asks them for the number of sides of the base shape on the pyramid and the number of sides of the cross-sectional shape on the prism. This is to help with the investigation on the final page. The last page asks pupils to look at the numbers in the tables and spot patterns/rules. It encourages them to express their thoughts in algebra if possible. Then, to test their theories, there are another two shapes to work with on this final page. Aimed at Year 6 - Year 9 pupils.

This quiz is made up of 5 rounds with ten slides of questions per round plus a bonus question (usually a harder challenge). Answers are provided so that the quiz could be left for a supply teacher/covering TA. Play with the whole class working independently, or in teams (it is set up to be played by 2 teams which are indicated by shapes in top corner of each slide). Each slide also has colour coding for level of difficulty and an option for winning points on each question. Each round has a particular theme or topic: tenses, phrases and clauses, punctuation, types of words and making words (including root words, suffixes and antonyms).

If your children read The Week Junior, get them to read the ‘May declares war on plastic waste’ article on p.10 in the 20th January 2018 edition. Follow it up with this quiz which is based mainly on reading comprehension skills. 10 questions. Great for morning work or guided reading.

If your children read The Week Junior, get them to read the ‘All about Spanish Flu’ article on p.12 in the 13th January 2018 edition. Follow it up with this quiz which is based mainly on reading comprehension skills. 10 questions. Great for morning work or guided reading.

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.

If your children read The Week Junior, get them to read the ‘Around the world in 2018’ article on p.6 in the 6th January 2018 edition. Follow it up with this quiz which is based mainly on reading comprehension skills. 10 questions. Great for morning work or guided reading.

Suitable for upper KS2, these powerpoints each contain 10 slides: half with questions and half with answers. Each slide has an activity that is differentiated but easily edited to suit your needs. My recommendation would be to let the children choose which colour box to start on and, if they finish ahead of time, they can progress onto the next box. This resource is ideal for revision of recently covered topics or for 'just keeping things ticking over'. Week 1: Number Week 2: Calculation

There are four activities here. 1) Circle the word that is the antonym of the main word given. 2) Circle the word that is the synonym of the main word given. 3) Colour the words that are the antonyms and synonyms of the main words given. 4) Improve sentences by choosing a stronger synonym to replace weaker vocabulary.

This resource shows a story (with a moral a bit like a fable) which has ten words highlighted within the story. These could be used as the initial focus for vocabulary for the lesson. There are also ten blank lines in the story and ten words at the bottom of the page. Children need to insert the words in the correct places in the story. With dictionary work, this could take a whole lesson or be good for a homework activity. The twenty words are: contradict companion endangered lingering significance imitate curious immobile gracious robust wander dubious sombre benefit ample despair sufficient resemble significance flawless tribute.

This resource seeks to highlight the fact that many children rely too heavily on speech when they are writing conversations. It gives an example of a speech relay (to-ing and fro-ing with speech line after line), which children so often fall into the trap of writing. It then shows how adding some narrative and description in amongst the speech can help the reader picture what's going on better. With two examples of classic children's novels, the children are encouraged to assess the balance of speech and narrative for themselves. Finally the children are given a speech relay which they are asked to 'flesh out' with some narrative to make a good balance for a more mature piece of writing.

This resource, over two pages, has four activities increasing in difficulty. The first two give the pupils sentences in which they need to identify and circle the actual spoken words. Having done this, they can attempt to write out the sentences in their books with the correct punctuation. A modeled example is given. The third activity asks the children to insert the punctuation on the sheet for a five-line conversation. The final activity is a conversation between two characters. The one character has all of his lines already written on the sheet. The second character's responses need to be written by the pupils.

This is not simply an activity of changing one to the other. The focus here is about how to make your writing more mature. The first two thirds of the worksheet are an explanation of how indirect speech can be used to avoid the narrator relaying every part of a conversation. It warns against long, tedious and even boring conversations, showing how indirect speech can speed up the narrative to keep the reader interested and the author in control. The last third of the sheet shows a conversation using direct speech and here the pupils should be challenged to seek out the more important and less important parts in order to turn some of the conversation into indirect speech.