This is a unit of work that I created for use with Years 3, 4, 5 & 6. It spans six sessions, although it can run for A LOT longer if desired! Although I am a musician, it requires no musical knowhow whatsoever to teach! I was very conscious of this as I was sharing the resource with teachers who lacked confidence in their musical knowledge and skills. This unit focuses predominately on listening, appraisal and understanding, but there are also opportunities for composition and performance included. KS2 Music Attainment Targets Covered: • Pupils should be taught to listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory. • Appreciate and understand a wide range of high quality music drawn from a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians. • Develop an understanding of the history of music. There are also optional links to Science within each lesson, which enable you to cover the statutory requirements for teaching sound: • Identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating. • Recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear. • Find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it. • Find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it. • Recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases. As a Maths Specialist I also couldn’t resist throwing in a few sorting opportunities in the form of Venn and Carroll diagrams! Overview • The topic starts with an informal baseline assessment and ends with an informal end of unit assessment. • Each session focuses on a specific family of the orchestra. • Pupils enter the classroom each session to an example of music featuring that particular family, giving them the opportunity to appraise music and develop their own taste. • Pupils learn what each orchestral instrument is called, what it sounds like and how it produces sound. • Pupils become familiar with the terms pitch, timbre, vibration, dynamics and tempo. • Children conduct research and learn through activities; however, notes are included for classrooms where ICT/books are not readily available or where pupils lack sufficient research skills. • Activities are fun and active - with low entry and high ceiling for differentiation. • A wode range of activities, e.g. rapping, sorting, poster making, ‘Happy Families’, interactive whiteboard games, mind-maps and guessing games. • Very little marking is required, as the activities lend themselves to being carried out in a group and outcomes can often be photographed or filmed for evidence. Planning, powerpoint and all paper resources are included. I hope you enjoy!

**Update: I have recently changed the skeleton file as some people fed-back that it wasn’t printing as it should as a Publisher file. It is now an A4 PDF file, but can be enlarged to A3 in order to get the same size of skeleton that I used on my display (or it could be scaled down to A5 for cute mini skeletons!) This interactive display invites the pupils to arrange the skeleton and label each bone correctly. I enlarged the skeleton, cut out each bone, laminated it and then stuck a bit of blu-tac to the back; however, if you are lucky enough to have a skeleton in school you could just label that! The display also includes questions and answers about the skeleton and bones and fun facts. I have included a picture of the finished display once it was moved to the school corridor (and, therefore, wasn’t being used interactively any more). I have changed the font to Comic Sans as the one I used isn’t often installed as standard, but each file is provided in Word as well as PDF so you can fiddle with the font and wording.

This resource is best suited to KS2 and features key vocabulary to help with setting up a science working wall. I have included it in Word format as well as PDF so you can edit to suit your favourite colours and fonts. It includes: Scientific skills, e.g. comparing results, using equipment. Types of scientific investigation with an example scientific question for each, e.g. observation, fair test (kids love a fair test!) Ways of presenting data with a picture of each, e.g. table, line graph. 18 scientific questions for pupils to match with the most appropriate type of enquiry. Uses: Print and laminate several copies for pupils to use as a toolkit to help with planning their investigations. Give pupils the selection of scientific questions provided and ask them to decide which type of investigation best suits each question. Similarly, give pupils scientific questions and ask them to consider what the data would look like and the most effective way to present it. Print and laminate these labels and keep them on your science working wall permanently or select a few to display as the focus of each unit. As a class, consider which scientific skills we are good at and which we need to work more on. Ask pupils to consider ‘What’s the same? What’s different?’ between different types of investigation and data presentation. Pose the scientific question for the lesson and ask pupils to rule out each type of investigation in turn until they find the best way of answering the question. Or flip this around and give the pupils a type of investigation and they must come up with a question that they would like to investigate. Hope this save a bit of time for you and also helps to keep the transferable scientific skills in the forefront of pupil’s minds whilst they enjoy exploring the subject knowledge of plants, humans, materials etc.

This effective interactive display was used in a Year 4 classroom for assessment to save marking! I used it as a baseline assessment and again at the end of the unit of work and simply took a photograph of each pupil’s effort as evidence and noted down anything they may have said whilst doing the activity. Unfortunately I don’t have a photograph of this display, but here is a rough description of how I arranged it: Headings ‘soluble’ and ‘insoluble’ for pupils to organise substances such as flour, salt, rice & sand underneath. Headings ‘Reversible’ and ‘Irreversible’ for pupils to organise descriptions of different changes under, e.g. ‘freezing orange juice to make lollies’. Matching the vocabulary to the correct definition (these could also be used as flash cards as another form of assessment), e.g. dissolve, filter, sieving. Gas, solid and liquid with their properties and a simple particle diagram. I also provided the children with post-it notes and they added their own examples of gases, solids and liquids; irreversible and reversible changes; and soluble and insoluble materials to the display as the unit progressed. I mounted the text on black card and laminated it as I knew they would be handled a lot. I just put blu-tac on the back, but Velcro would be another option. My display is quite plain as I didn’t want to distract pupils when assessing them, but the display is provided in Word format as well as PDF so it can be glammed up with colour if you like. There are many ways that this display could be used. One activity that I did later on in the year was to bring out the cards and use them as headings on a giant Carroll Diagram (the assessment was for maths data handling but it was good to revise the vocabulary). Pupils placed items under headings ‘soluble’ and ‘insoluble’ and other criteria such as ‘edible’ or ‘inedible’. I also used a Venn diagram for solids and liquids and children placed food items and other items in two qiant PE hoops with an overlap in the middle. I hope you enjoy using this resource and I hope that it saves you some time!

A set of nine mini-investigations that can be set up at different stations for pupils to move around and experiment. Idea for use: Laminate the instruction cards and set them up on tables with the required equipment. Provide groups with an A3 print out of the recording sheet to jot down notes as they carousel around the activities, or provide individual sheets at A4 size either during or after carrying out the mini-investigations. Files are provided in Word format as well as PDF for easy editing if necessary. The tasks are designed to link really well with the Year 4 Programme of Study for Science, but I did this with a Y3/4/5/6 mix class (!) and they all seemed to get a lot out of it. There was lots of discussion in the room and it was great to hear pupils practising the vocabulary of sound (e.g. vibrate, medium, volume, source). Would work well as a revision activity, baseline assessment for starting the topic, or as a Science Week activity. Year 4 ScienceProgramme of Study Sound Pupils should be taught to: • identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating • recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear • find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it • find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it • recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases

This display was used whilst teaching the IPC ‘Brainwave’ topic to a Y6 class. It covers: The different kinds of intelligence. Interesting facts about the brain. Labels for different parts of the brain. I painted a large brain and put it in the middle of the display with the text added around it. For those that don’t have time to paint (!) I have added an image of the brain to the last page of the resource that can be scaled up to A3 or you could ask your pupils to draw one.

A one off lesson planned as an addition to the Investigators IPC Unit. The lesson was designed to be fun, but had a more serious purpose of developing the pupils ability to write conclusions to scientific experiments. The lesson is based on the premise that the previous night when I got back from the staff meeting someone had eaten my chocolates - I had made a big thing the previous day about the chocolates that my colleague had bought me for helping her with her assembly. I had my suspicions about which member of staff it was but needed proof - the job of the pupils. Pupils do finger print analysis, handwriting analysis, chromatography and DNA barcode analysis to gather evidence and come to a conclusion (justified with evidence) about who stole the chocolate. I did this as a real life investigation with some very willing colleagues. Selected pupils were sent off to obtain fingerprints and alibis from the four suspects and when presented with the evidence our criminal teaching assistant did a great acting job when coming clean! Obviously you don’t need to go this far if you don’t want and you can just do the lesson as it is without basing it in your own school. Wherever possible, I have included Word versions of the files as well as PDFs so that you can customise to suit your own school if you like. This has everything you need to get going - you will just need to label four different kinds of pen, e.g. whiteboard marker, ink pen, biro & felt-tip. The resource includes a teacher lead guided group with focused questions and recording sheet. Linked to Science APP Grid. This lesson was rated outstanding by Ofsted. It can be used across KS2 and would work brilliantly as a fun lesson, observation or as part of Science Week. Enjoy!