Most teachers will agree that the students are the best part of the job. Of course, there will always be those few kids who become your mortal enemies for a year or two, but excluding them − we’re in it for the students.

This is a truth that can sometimes feel like it has fallen by the wayside when you are up until midnight adding the finishing touches to an essay frame that will maximise the chances of everyone in your class ticking every single assessment objective, or when you are creating yet another traffic-light objectives slide for your PowerPoint presentation on the off-chance that it will make the difference between good and outstanding in that observation lesson tomorrow.

Making resources is an activity that has a habit of expanding to fill every spare minute of your evening. However, hundreds of brilliant lesson plans and activities are being uploaded by teachers every day to the TES Connect website, ready to be downloaded and shared by other teachers all around the world.

It was long overdue that the TES Resources team found a way to really showcase some of those lesson plans and activities so that they can help as many teachers as possible.

To highlight the cream of our free resources crop, we have now created a shiny new set of topic hubs, based on popular teaching areas.

The following pages are already live and more are in production:

American literature
Food education
Minibeasts
Teaching poetry - Primary
Teaching poetry - Secondary
Teaching Shakespeare
Teaching the First World War

From these pages you can watch videos, download entire schemes of work, listen to podcasts and − most importantly − save yourself time from having to reinvent the wheel.

Feeling under constant pressure to jump through hoops and spend every minute of my spare time working to do right by my students was why I ultimately left teaching and came to join the team at TES Connect. I still miss the students. But if I ever decide to return to the ranks, at least now I know where to come to make my planning work that little bit easier.

The TES Resources team are currently developing further pages and welcome suggestions for other topic areas that we could cover.