New Team Member

Primary Resources is pleased to announce the arrival of a new team member, Kefira Jasmine Pitchford. Unfortunately, due to the additional staff training required, there will be no site update this week and we'll be operating a slightly reduced service for a while. At only two days old, Kefira hasn't quite mastered website coding or memorised the contents of the National Curriculum. I'm sure she'll soon pick things up and will be helping me out in no time at all. :)

On the Forums

http://www.primarystuff.co.uk/forum/
I just thought I'd flag up a few of the recent discussions and requests for help on our site forums...

Gemma is looking for some Year 2 Smart Notebook activities. KS1Teacher is looking for help to support a hearing impaired pupil who is about to join her class. There's also a couple of requests for help with teaching riddles to Year 2 and Studentteacher is looking for some practical symmetry activities.

If you can help with any of the above then please pop along to the forums and post a message. Why not have a look at some of the other discussions or post a request for help of your own?

Primary Design & Technology

http://www.primarydandt.org/
This site from Nuffield links to their commercial primary solutions scheme but includes a lot of free downloads. You can access any of their 24 units of work, see examples of work by children and obtain additional units linked to or developed from the QCA ones.

The Picasso Project

http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/
If you're looking for paintings by Picasso to show your students then this is the site you need. The On-line Picasso Project contains over 12,000 pieces of the great artist's work. Simply click on a year of Picasso's life and you'll be shown all the material that he created during that time. There's notes/commentaries for many of the paintings as well as a separate Picasso biography section. It's probably best used to display material you've selected (prior to the lesson) to the whole class on an interactive whiteboard or data projector.

Site Update: 19th January 2007

There have been 38 new resources added to the main website this week and 182 images added to the photo bank. Full details are below. Many thanks to those teachers who took the time out to send in material.

ENGLISH: Calligrams (ppt) / Adverbs (ppt) / Organisation of a Dictionary (ppt) / Letter from Beboop / Character Profile
MATHS: Line Basics (ppt) / Rub and Reveal Number Bonds (Activ) / What Time is It? - Digital (ppt) / Number Bonds (5 and 10) / Dominoes (Smart) / Numberline Addition / Halving / Quartering / Time Problems / Bridging through 10 (2 digits) / Nearest 10
SCIENCE: Parts of a Plant / Absorbency / Earth and Space Lessons (Smart) x 4
HISTORY: Ancient Egypt: The Country / Ancient Egypt: Fashion
GEOGRAPHY: Traffic in Cambridge (ppt) / Environmental Quality Analysis / My Map of the UK / Flags of the UK
ART: Making Escher Patterns
D&T: Introduction to Levers
RE: God as the Creator / What do Christians Believe About Jesus?
LANGUAGES: French: Identity Cards / Spanish: Identity Cards
OTHER: The Nativity / Advent Alliteration / Writing in Gaelic
PHOTOS: Classroom Display Ideas: Art (4), Foundation (2), D&T (1). Science (3), Geography (1), English (1) / History: 1950s Fishing (7), Tudor Building (1) / Art: Scuplture (5) / Geography: Rivers (146), Weather (5), Mountains (1), USA (1) / Science: Birds (1), Plants (2), Fruit (1)

Eduweb's Adventures

http://www.eduweb.com/portfolio/adventure.php
Eduweb help create great educational websites for a whole range of clients. This page on their website allows you to browse their portfolio of projects by subject or age group. It's a US site so everything is listed by grade (see this page on our site for a conversion table) but there's plenty of material that's great UK teachers and students. I've recently been exploring some of the brilliant visual arts websites.

Perseus and the Gorgon

Primary Extra is pleased to announce the release of the 'Perseus and the Gorgon' Greek myth pack.

Written and illustrated by Gareth Pitchford the pack contains the stories of 'Perseus and the Gorgon' and 'King Midas and his Golden Touch'. The myths are told through full colour cartoon illustrations and simple, easy to understand text.

Each story comes with a printable colour and black & white book, an interactive whiteboard/data projector presentation, story sequencing sheets and copies of the cartoon images from the story.

For more details please see the Primary Extra website.

Primary Extra features commercial education resources. Sales of these resources help fund the work on the free Primary Resources website.

BBC - Religions

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/
This BBC site isn't particularly that suitable for students but it is an absolutely essential resource for teachers. It contains extensive information on seventeen world religions, split up into easy to navigate sections. There's also a really useful multifaith calendar which you can view by calendar month or by specific faith.

Brims History Websites

Two useful history websites...

Henry VIII and the Tudors
http://www.brims.co.uk/tudors/
This site contains lots of information about Tudor times along with plenty of facts about Henry VIII and his six wives.

The Romans in Britain
http://www.brims.co.uk/romans/
There's lots of material on all aspects of Roman life including towns & homes, food & farming, clothes, Roman gods and why the Romans invaded Britain in the first place.

Site Update: 12th January 2007

The first update of 2007 adds 75 new resources to the main website. Full details are below. My thanks go to everyone who took the time to send in resources during the festive period.

ENGLISH: Simile (Active) / Balanced Argument Writing Frame / CSPS Planning Sheet / Tongue Twisters (Activ) / Limericks (Activ) / Limerics Cloze / Characteristics of Fables (Textease) / Prefixes: un- re- pre- / Year 4 HF Words (Smart) / Year 5 HF Words (Smart) / Tenses Prompts / Compound Words (Easiteach) / Wow Words - Verbs / Wow Words - Adjectives / Wow Words - Adverbs
MATHS: Place Value Game - Biggest (ppt) / Place Value Game - Smallest (ppt) / Coordinates (ppt) / What will you watch tonight? / Halving and Doubling / Venn Diagrams (Number Sorting) / Rounding 2 digits to the nearest 10 / Division by Repeated Subtraction (ppt) / Farmer Giles' Fields / Mental Multiplication using Factors (Smart) / The Red Express Investigation / Ordering 4 Digit Numbers / Multiplying and Doubling by 10 and 100 (ppt) / Coloured Fraction Wall / Is it Fair? (Dice) / Pizza Problems (4 levels) / School Supplies (3 levels)
SCIENCE: Light (ppt) / The Earth and Beyond (ppt) / How We See Things (Smart) / Guess the Fruit (ppt) / Green Plants (ppt)
HISTORY: Britain Since the 1930s WWtbaM (ppt) x 3 / WWII Questions / World War II Timeline / The Vikings (Smart) / Viking Research / Anne Boleyn - The Early Years / Catherine of Aragon Fact File / Order Henry's Wives / Ancient Egypt Class Assembly
GEOGRAPHY: Transport Sort (Smart) / Types of Homes (ppt) / When Were Our Homes Built? (ppt)
D&T: Money Containers (Smart)
RE: Pentecost Wordsearches x 2
MUSIC: Animal Magic (Smart) x 2
LANGUAGES: French: Christmas Flashcards / Fun at Christmas (Smart)
FOUNDATION: Foundation Stage Profile Assessment Form / Learning Objectives: CLL, MD, CD, KUW, PD, PSEP
PSHE: Anti-Bullying Week WWtbaM (ppt) / Bullying Role Play Cards / Y5 BASEAL Theme 2 Lessons 1-6 (ppt) / Y5 BASEAL Them 4 Lessons 1-5 (ppt)
OTHER: Superstar of the Week / Outstanding Work / Thoughtful Advent Calendar
ASSEMBLY: Symbols: Light / Black History (Month) Class Assembly

Young People's Trust for the Environment

http://www.yptenc.org.uk
This charity site aims aims to encourage young people's understanding of the environment and the need for sustainability. There's almost two hundred great animal fact sheets (on animals and also on the environment) which are perfect for older KS2 students. The site links to the Green School Awards which features a curriculum guide that gives ideas for incorporating environmental issues into your lessons.

Foundation Jigsaws

http://ngfl.northumberland.gov.uk/Foundation/
This page of foundation stage resources (from the Northumberland Grid for Learning) has a selection of click and drag jigsaw activities to develop mouse skills.

My Learning

http://www.mylearning.org/
This is a great site from the museums, libraries and archives in Yorkshire. There's a great 'design a super bug' interactive activity (where you can create all manner of weird bugs and print out a "Top Trumps" style card for your monster) and an interesting Victorian millionaire challenge.

As well as fun interactive games the site contains a large number of photo resources such as one that follows a trip through India and Pakistan, one on 20th Century artists and one on Saxon artifacts.

Collect Britain

http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/
The Collect Britain website contains over 90,000 images and sounds from the collection of the British Library. Quite a few of the different exhibits will be of interest to primary teachers. There's a large collection of Victorian photographs, a great batch of sound clips to illustrate regional accents and dialects and a lovely selection of religious manuscripts. The search engine is very interesting. Not only can you search by keyword but you can also find items of local interest by searching using a UK postcode.

"Happy New Year" & "Thanks"

I just thought I’d post a message to say a belated “Happy New Year” and let everyone know that updates to the blog and the main Primary Resources site will resume next week.

The start of a new year is the perfect time to look back at the old one. It was a great 2006 for Primary Resources with the number of resources growing rapidly and the site reaching an even greater audience than before.

Despite what some people think, Primary Resources isn’t produced by a big team… it’s just me! Without your support I simply wouldn’t be able to keep the site running.

I’d just like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped out during the past year… whether you sent in one of the vital contributions that make the site what it is, took the time out to take part in discussions on our forums, made a generous donation of money to the site or purchased products from Primary Extra.

Thank you for making Primary Resources one of the biggest totally FREE teaching resources sites on the Internet. I really do appreciate your support.

Here’s to a great 2007!