Tag: Primary Teaching

I visited Recreate last August and was really impressed with the range of products they have. Here’s the blogpost I wrote about Recreate and how to join. You can read it here.

What is a perfect school? Is there really such a thing? I’ve worked in lots of different schools both as a substitute teacher and as a member of staff and to be honest I think every school has lots of positives and some negatives too. I look back fondly on some of the schools I’ve […]

I love Music and try to incorporate it as much as possible into the classroom – listening and responding, song singing, playing instruments are all part of the music curriculum. I also find teaching times tables through song works brilliantly for many children.

Ultan the editor of ‘Hands On – Crafts for the Classroom’ got in touch with me before we went back to school about this publication. Art is certainly not my strong point so I was excited to read about the books and delighted when the hard copies arrived in the post. My first impression was […]

Making a timetable for resource can be tricky. The resource hour allocations were cut by 15% a few years ago. I find it best to work in minutes rather than hours so I’ve made this table which you might find helpful. It includes the new allocations (-15%) and the minutes that the child is entitled […]

I wrote these social stories when I was working as a resource teacher 2 years ago. Social stories are great when teaching children how to behave in different situations. I usually write these with the child so each child has a slightly different version that best suits there needs. These social stories include; Listening to […]

I try to have lots of different concrete materials in the resource room for Maths. This makes the learning more enjoyable and fun for the children. Many children learn best when they are doing hands on activities but these materials can be very expensive. Most of the items I use are inexpensive and some are […]

This blogpost was written last year.  I love using mini whiteboards in the classroom – I often use them for testing spellings/ irish spellings or phrases/ tables etc. I also use them to practice maths questions before the children work independently in their copies. Making mistakes on whiteboards is no big issue as they can […]

A recount of ‘My Summer Holidays’ is a really nice activity to do during the first week. It’s important for the children to plan this recount so here are some nice planning templates (free download below)

I’ve been using Class Dojo for the last few years and really think its brilliant for classroom management. I use it for rewarding children for working hard, being persistent, showing kindness, group work, being ‘on task’ etc. How I used it previous years; I rewarded children 1/2 points for a variety of different reasons (see above). […]