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?…
Read More
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.…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
My first introduction to poetry was when I was seven. I was on a family holiday and, in an attempt to entertain, my uncle recited to me The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. It was a remarkably successful attempt for I…
Read More
This list is particularly important to us, and despite many of the books appearing on other lists of ours, it was felt that we needed to give these titles their own list and within the list, some sections to showcase…
Read More
This month’s review explores the theme of perspective, in two senses of the word: keeping things in perspective and looking at things from others’ perspective. We need to be very careful that children have time and space to be still;…
Read More
This time of year is all about new beginnings: it’s a new year; a new school term; the days are starting to become longer and many people make resolutions. Some might focus on being kinder or spending more time listening…
Read More
