This lists materials and their properties and can be used in conjunction with worksheets so children can decide on the best type of materials for certain jobs, or can use the correct words to describe materials that you give them. I am using this with year 4 as a prompt because I have to leave a series of cover lessons.

This is a continuation of the study of Haiku, allowing children to explore the rhythm, syllables, and form of the Tanka.

A brightly coloured method to get children to question their own work - Am I learning in the best way for me? - What are my targets? - How am I going to improve on what I have done? and so on. This can be edited to say whatever you want, or individualised for each child. This is a great way to introduce self assessment.

A powerpoint presentation showing a little storyboard about people seeing a cube from different sides, and how they work out who is telling the truth about what they see. Great for starting discussions about seeing things from other perspectives, and listening to others. Also could be a story starter.

This is a worksheet for children (year 5 or 6) to use as an introduction to the free programming program 'Scratch'. They can use this at their own pace, and it leaves you free to help those who need it.

You will need to have 10 sound files available for the hearing experiment which I could download but are freely availble from sound effects sites. These experiments take a bit of organisation, but the children love them.

An activinspire flipchart covering digestion including some questions that can utilise the voting handsets.

Children can research information to complete their cards, and then play top trumps in small groups to see if they can remember details.

I used this with post-it notes, the children added words or phrases on postits to the relevant area once I had given them a starting sentence. Then we threw them away and I gave them a new starter. It helped them with the idea of quickly planning a story and worked really well.

This is an activinspire flipchart file based on a resource that I didn't make up, but it gives an interactive aspect to debating and using the language of discussion. I hope it is useful to you, I used it with my year 4 class, but it could be adapted for any age by editing the topics.

Useful worksheet to provoke discussion in groups on a particular topic. In this example I was using it to get children to invent ways of distinguishing between hard boiled and raw eggs, but I will be using it for other science discussions and may use it in PSHCE for philosophical matters - I think this could be used in English as well to develop story plots... please let me know of any other ideas for its use!