Children have £28,000 to spend on building a theme park. They must spend their money on rides, refreshments and appearance of the park in different ratios. All the money must be spent. This was challenging but the children were really engaged with it! Please let me know how it goes if you use it. Thank you for the comment. A new, improved, updated version with more rides has been added!

A selection of literacy starters to warm up brains for the lesson. They are fully editable. Please let me know if they are useful at all!

An investigation based on creating a dodgy fairground game! Children have to create a spinner with the best probabilities for making money in this fairground stall game.

A fractions investigation that involves converting fractions, decimals and percentages to find out which Deal or No Deal box contains the most amount of money.

We were writing adverts and I wanted the children to include a rhetorical question. This is a short smart board I made to help them. After this I used rhetorical questions in a warm up. I gave each pair a random object, such as a screwed up piece of paper, some blue tac, a broken paper clip. They had to write a short advert for the object with a rhetorical question.

I used these questions for my guided reading session on Stig of the Dump. We looked at the page where Barney enters the den. Includes assessment focus (APP for reading), questions and space for notes on children's answers.

A newspaper report based on the Highwayman poem. Also includes a letter which I put into a story box. The story box contai9ned items from the poem, such as Bessie's red ribbon and the Highwayman's pistol. The box was delivered to the classroom as a parcel for Year 5. They were very excited and really bought into the detective letter!

My class are struggling with 3 mark answers so we're trying 'The Power of 3'; finding 3 quality bits of evidence in the text. This reading questions answer sheet is helping children to formulate their responses. There is also an example answer sheet to show how to fill it in and how it relates to SAT's questions.

These writing level posters are based on the writing APP assessment grids. They are written in child friendly language. They are not all inclusive, but I have found them useful to help children understand the levelling system and be clear of their targets.

This is my plan/Smartboard for teaching Year 4 negative numbers, week 1. It took me ages so I thought I'd share it in the hope that it will save others time!

A selection of maths starters to help warm up brains for the numeracy lesson! Everything is editable so can be changed to suit your class. Please let me know if they are helpful!

We are writing our own holiday brochures. I created this based on a brochure I had read to give the children an example of this type of writing. There is a video on www.thomson.co.uk (type in the name of the resort to find it). I used the video to engage them initially, which really worked! We then read this, pulled out the features e.g. rhetorical questions, and used them to create our success criteria. The children then chose another Disney resort to write about for their brochure using the same layout and the success criteria we had identified.

We are currently doing a biography unit. The Year 6 teacher invented a character called Jamie Davies (the children think he's real!) He is a rollercoaster inventor responsible for many of the children's favourite rides! I wanted them to research using different sources, so I created a newspaper report, a chapter from a book and a webpage for them to explore. All information is made up, although the children don't know that! The webpage works best if you run it as a webpage preview so it looks like a real webpage and has working hyperlinks.

A smartboard and missing words worksheet about the heart muscle and how it works. Hope it's useful!

I used this for my level 3/4 guided reading group. This was an independent activity for a non-teacher led session following up a full guided read.

I wanted the children to be more engaged in their problem solving, so I bought in some coffee, sugar and mugs from the staff room. They had to use the resources to solve problems around how much coffee our headteacher drinks. They really enjoyed the context! These worked well but there is definitely room for improvement. I think the problems are a good basis for an investigation and could perhaps be more open ended. What do you think?

This term we have begun to trial some whole class reading strategies in upper primary. Here is a sample of the planning and resources I have supported Year 4 with. The medium term plan is incomplete as for a couple of weeks the teachers planned alone without my support! We focused on areas the children have struggled with, identified from our assessments. These were mainly inference and understanding the meaning of words in context. Any feedback or ideas on how to further develop would be greatly appreciated. We are early on in our journey and striving to make our teaching of reading the best we can! If the resources are useful please do make use of them and let me know what you liked about them.

Mr Sweetytum has the most popular sweet shop in town. His sweets are tasty and fantastic! Jen visits the sweetshop with a purse full of silver coins. Are Jen and her friend's statements correct? Children must read the statements, understand them and find evidence to prove them right or wrong. Some of my class used large coins to help them, others used drawings and some were able to calculate using written or mental methods.

A worksheet for practising unit fractions of shapes and amounts. A few other fractions to challenge at the end. Not very exciting but did the job!

A powerpoint starter for homophones and plural possessive apostrophes for year 4. Powerpoint pages are hyperlinked to respond to children's answers, so click 'play slideshow from beginning' for full effect!

This is a very simple resource but it has had a huge impact on reading in my class. The children have been struggling with inferencing and I was finding it difficult to scaffold them in develoing this skill. We have been talking a lot about our brains and thinking skills (metacognition) recently and I've introduced the term &'schema&';. They now know that to inference they must use words from the text, what they already know (schema), add them together and the result is an inference! The table supports them in this.