Teaching packs

Using the story of St. George as a leaping off point, this lovely pack asks pupils to think about friendly dragons. Do they know any from stories or films? A fun, dragon-making activity leads the pack. Pupil tasks follow on, asking pupils to first describe the colourful, quirky dragons. We've then provided flexible resources for a novel, creative-writing context, suitable for different ages and abilities. Introduce the idea of a 'School for Dragons', with our four friendly dragons being new pupils. One sheet asks for a list of jobs that a newly recruited Dragon Trainer would carry out, while caring for the dragons. From here, discuss story ideas with pupils, imagining what life would be like in this unusual school. What is each dragon like? - each has their own look and personality. At the end of the pack are interactive storybooks for St. George, along with the text and images in printable form. And lastly, a Story Spinner is available for creating story character sets, should you wish pupils to write a traditional "Dragon Slayer" story. Poor Dragon!

This pack contains books and sequencing activities for the five lifecycles / reproduction cycles of: mammal (hedgehog), plant (sunflower), amphibian (frog), insect (butterfly) and bird (hen). For texts and activities more suitable for older or more-able children click here

This information / explanation pack contains everything you need to know about plants. The lead book takes a simple look at the dependence of animals on plants and vice versa. Further activities take a more encyclopaedic approach, with an information book that details different types of plants as well as their parts. An 'Information Sheet Maker' (which can also be used for a leaflet) is ideal for non-fiction writing. It has several writing frames and the ability to include pictures from the library as well as to add fact or caption boxes.  Completing the pack are labelling and sorting activities. 

This is a fantastic stimulus for 'familiar settings' story writing, perhaps on a rainy or snowy day. The lead story passes through three seasons, using the change in weather to drive the story. It contains all the features common in this genre of writing and provides a model for pupils' own writing. Supporting interactive resources will help pupils focus on characters or scenes, before writing their own stories. Included, are two snowy story starters that use the same characters and setting. 

A handy set of tools, all based around constructing words with grapheme-phoneme combinations.   See the How To guides for functionality and the Top Tips for examples of learning dialogues.

Configurable flash cards that will read the word on the card phonetically, as well as the whole word. The main activity is the 1st set of words, which takes you from satpin words, through all the common 3 letter CVC combinations, finishing with a small set of 4 letter CVC words ending with ck, ss, ll, ff. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th sets can be launched from the smaller thumbnails and provide words compatible with most phonic schemes. A handy cross reference table is available on the document, Phonics Progressions and Sets Overview. The further pdf documents are supporting "printables" - sheets of word cards for all of the words in the activities.

A handy tool for teaching new phonemes and blending skills. Click on the buttons to draw the letters of each word, one by one. Talk to children about what the word could be as it is revealed, asking them to make the sounds of each letter. The main activity is the 1st set of words, which takes you from satpin words, through all the common 3 letter CVC combinations, finishing with a small set of 4 letter CVC words ending with ck, ss, ll, ff. Select a specific word list from the settings menu - the default is satpin. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th sets can be launched from the smaller thumbnails and provide words compatible with most phonic schemes. A handy cross reference table is available on the document, Phonics Progressions and Sets Overview. The further pdf documents are supporting "printables" - sheets of word cards for all of the words in the activities

A tool to show the phonetic structure of a word. Put a word in the machine to segment it. Where possible, words have an image to reveal, after segmenting.  The main activity is the 1st set of words, which takes you from satpin words, through all the common 3 letter CVC combinations, finishing with a small set of 4 letter CVC words ending with ck, ss, ll, ff.  The 2nd, 3rd and 4th sets can be launched from the smaller thumbnails and provide words compatible with most phonic schemes. A handy cross reference table is available on the document, Phonics Progressions and Sets Overview. The further pdf documents are supporting "printables" - sheets of word cards for all of the words in the activities.

This is a special 'thank-you-for-subscribing' pack containing large-size cut outs of the TES iboard superheroes. Use these along with the Character Spotlight and Story Spinner interactive activities to stimulate story writing.