We have chosen some of our favourite non-fiction books that are beautifully illustrated too! Many of these are hardback and feel like the kind of reference book you’d want to keep out on your coffee table too!
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The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language, and to develop their love of literature through widespread…
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As the nights are drawing in there is always a sense of wonder at the inky blanket across the world, the stars in the night sky and the feeling of cosying up on the sofa perhaps with a log fire…
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In the month of celebrating the birthday of the late Cesária Evora, the Cape Verdean vocalist and recording artist nicknamed the ‘barefoot diva’, we are thinking about stars: stars in the fame and fortune sense as well as stars that…
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It’s this time of year again. As the curtains close on Summer, minds tentatively return to the logistics of setting up a classroom and as always there are many questions bouncing down school corridors: Which books will I be using?…
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We've taken the top of our TBR* piles and reviewed them for you in case you needed to create your own pile. And if if you didn't, well have a look and be nosey about what we've enjoyed of late.…
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It’s nearing the end of the school year and the promise of the summer holiday - those endless (hopefully) sun-lit days - is tantalisingly close. But first there are sports days, concerts and fetes to attend. There are also change-up…
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The planning process is an important one especially when tackling extended narratives. It acts as a bridge between children doing sentence/word level work, writing short extracts, and knitting all of these skills together into cohesive and finished stories. It allows…
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We have chosen some of our favourite scientific books – there’s something here for everyone to get geeky about! There is a mixture of narratives that contain scientific characters and contexts, narrative non-fiction texts that give us information about scientists…
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At this time of year we are thinking about transition from year 6 to year 7 and what better text to use for this than A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master? Now, as this is a fairly meaty text with an intricate…
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This time of year always feels full of hope: the days are longer; the sun shines over our corner of the world (at least on some days) and there is a sense of life and light. And those are our themes for this month’s review - life…
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It is a usual Monday morning at school. I am charging around the corridors getting resources ready for the day ahead - the ever-too-short weekend already a distant memory. It is always on a Monday morning – at 08:30 GMT…
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There is much talk in the world of education at the moment around the ‘million word gap’ and we know that there is a direct correlation between how much children are read to and the size of their vocabularies. Unfortunately,…
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This was a fun list to write. Actually, this age is all about being a little humorous. So, how we did we choose them? Well, they needed to be books of the smaller variety, not too dense and ideally with some…
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In an age where mobile phones, email and social media allows instant and constant connectedness with one another, loneliness is a real issue for many people. And whilst loneliness can be something we all experience in our lives, it’s seemingly…
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How do we define ‘important’? Well, it’s a picture book so the pictures need to be good. And where there are words, they need to be good too. But more importantly the message needs to be STRONG and that will…
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In a change to our usual reviews this month, we were so overjoyed by the incredible selection of authors and titles included with this year’s World Book Day £1 books that we thought it would be very much remiss of…
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Fairy tales are vital to refer to for plot and character when it comes to teaching any narrative form... Hans Christian Anderson’s tales feature heavily here and The Brothers Grimm are widely attributed as being the collectors of many of…
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