Site Update: 27th September 2007

Thanks to all the teachers who kindly sent in contributions this week, I've been able to add 40 new resources to the main website. As usual, full details are given here.

Site Update: 21st September 2007

I've added over 40 new resources to the main website this week as well the photographs mentioned in the previous post. Full details of the update are given here.

New Photos Added

http://www.primarystuff.co.uk/photos
I've just added 14 new images to the photograph section of the site including a collection of displays and some aerial images of rivers in Borneo. [Quick link to latest uploads]

I'm always looking for more contributions to the photo section. Why not snap some photos of your displays and send them in?

Site Update: 14th September 2007

I've added 30 new resources to the main website this week as well as lots of new features. Full details are given here.

Primary Interactive (Update)

http://www.primaryinteractive.co.uk/
I've just finished adding the majority of the interactive activities from Primary Resources to the new site for students. Let me know if there's anything else that you think should be included!

Primary Interactive

http://www.primaryinteractive.co.uk
There are a lot of interactive games and activities on the Primary Resources site. Many of them were created a long time ago but still seem popular with teachers!

Quite often teachers will send their students directly to Primary Resources to use the activities online, which isn't ideal because the site contains advertising. Links from other websites to our activities are blocked (because of so many occasions in the past where other sites were passing off our resources as their own) so there's no easy way of jumping straight to the resources.

To get around this problem I've set up a new webpage with links to a selection of our online activities. At the moment it only contains links to the resources that I've created myself (simply because they were the ones that I've done screenshots for in the past). In the future, I'll add a lot of the other interactive games from the site to this page (and also split it into categories for easier navigation).

Please let me know if there are any activities on the site that you regularly use online with your students and I'll add them to the new page.

New Front Page

A slightly tweaked version of the main Primary Resources index page is now online. I've been meaning to change it for ages but haven't had chance to do so until now. It's basically the same as the old page but now includes a digest of posts from our various sites (such as the blogs and the forums) as well as a list of all our RSS feeds.

More NPF Planning

Hi everyone. Now that the "daily" links have been moved to our new links site I'm going to be posting entries in this blog to keep you informed about my work on Primary Resources.

Today I've mostly been doing some cosmetic work on the site, like adding a standardised header to the forum pages and the photograph section (something I've been meaning to do for a year!)

I have also started to add some of the new contributions to the next update. Those of you who have looked at Emma Ede's great numeracy planning (for the New Primary Framework) will be pleased to know that she's sent me some more files this week. I know how useful these will be to people so I'm posting links to them early here...

• Year 3 Autumn 1 Block C1 NPF Planning
• Year 3 Autumn 1 Block D1 NPF Planning
• Year 4 Autumn Medium Term Planning

Moving Links

http://www.primarystuff.co.uk/blog/
Several people have emailed me saying they like the new links section. As it seems to be working well I'm going to post any new links on that site rather than here in the future. I'll continue to use this blog to post about new additions, improved features and changes to the main Primary Resources site.

NWLG Primary Music

http://www.nwlg.org/pages/resources/pmusic/home.htm
This site, from the North West Learning Grid, contains a collection of activities for teaching music to Key Stage 1 and 2 students. The activities are organised into distinct units and come complete with sound files, lyrics and sheet music where appropriate. The site features a music glossary as well as a grid that shows where each unit fits in with the National Curriculum.

SEAL Survey

(LINK)
One of our forum regulars, Storm, has set up a survey to get some idea of how many site visitors are using the SEAL Curriculum Resources in their school. Click on the link above to participate in the poll.

Combined RSS Feed Test

I'm testing out a combined RSS feed for all the Primary Resources sites. It's at...

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PrimaryResources

If you subscribe to that (using your RSS reader) then you will receive updates from...

• the Primary Resources Blog
• the Primary Resources Links Blog (including comments)
• the Primary Resources forum (posts)
• the Primary Resources photo section

...as one single feed. At the moment the news comes in a little slower than subscribing to each feed individually but it's quite an easy way of keeping up to date with all the information on different parts of the site.

Rugby World Cup Sites

Here's some more Rugby World Cup themed sites, many of which could be adapted to support Primary Languages work...

NACELL Online: Sports Events
http://www.nacell.org.uk/resources/online_res_sports.htm
A whole collection of rugby links (as well as some for other major sporting events such as football, cycling and the Olympics).

Ma France: Rugby World Cup
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/mafrance/html/rugby/
Essential rugby vocabulary in French.

British Council: Parlez vous rugby?
http://www.britishcouncil.org/bg/france-education-parlez-vous-rugby.htm
Some of the sections of the rugby posters document (towards the bottom of the webpage) might be useful for different subjects (such as the one on art and rugby). There's also a "Survival Kit" with useful French phrases.

EdRugby: Maths

(LINK)
If you're looking to link your maths lessons to the current Rugby World Cup (or later in the year to the Six Nations etc.) then check out the 'Rugby Scoring' activity on the excellent EdRugby site from the Australian Rugby Union. There are also activities for other subject areas including a great one on rugby writing and also lessons based around rugby kits.

New Links Archive

http://www.primarystuff.co.uk/blog/
I've been posting useful (I hope!) links for primary students and teachers in this blog since July 2005. Because of the way I've got this particular blogging system set up, it's become quite difficult to navigate the hundreds of past links, never mind try and locate ones relevant to particular subjects.

So, I've spent a couple of days moving a lot of the old links to a new categorised and searchable archive site (see the link above). I'm going to be testing out the site over the next few weeks to see how it holds up, so please pop along and take a look. You can rate each link, leave comments, search all the posts and automatically add bookmarks from the blog.

At the moment I'm going to be posting the daily links here and on the new site. The new system should help new readers to this blog discover some of the excellent sites I've recommended in the past.

["Everyday's a school day"... Lesson learned today - always check through a new piece of software to find the button that says "Import posts from old blogging system" before spending several days manually copying and pasting them across!]

Site Update: 7th September

New update time. In this update 57 new resources have been added to the main website as well as 32 new images (mentioned earlier in the week) to the photograph section. Full details (with direct links) are given here. Thanks to everyone who sent in contributions this time! Find out how you can support the site by clicking this link.

Online Photo Editing

http://www.picnik.com/ & http://www.wiredness.com/
These two sites are great if you want to tweak a digital image on a computer that doesn't have a decent photo editing program loaded. Both Picknik and Wiredness allow you to upload and edit an image online. You can fix image problems (such as red eye), change the dimensions, apply special effects, add text and more. There's even support for importing directly from FlickR and Picasa albums.

New Photographs

http://www.primarystuff.co.uk/photos
I've just added 32 new images to the photograph section of the site. There are some great pictures of animals in Tsavo East National Park, Kenya as well as lots of interesting classroom displays. [Quick link to latest uploads]

Dr. Universe

http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/
This great site, from Washington State University in the US, features clever cat Dr. Universe answering science questions posed by students. What makes your hands prune up when soaked in water? How do harmful bacteria make you ill? Do frogs sleep? How do our bodies make blood? They're just some of the questions answered.

Small Miracles Harvest Pack

http://www.harvesthelp.org.uk/
Harvest Help is a charity that supports people in rural Africa by teaching sustainable farming to allow farmers to work their way out of poverty.

Every year they produce a free Harvest celebration pack for primary schools. This year's pack is now available from their website on this page. A direct link to the file is here. The pack contains ideas of how you can link your Harvest celebrations to life in Africa as well as fundraising ideas, should you decide to support Harvest Help.

WobZip

http://wobzip.filetap.com/
I had an email this morning asking whether there was a way to access some of the zipped files on our site if your computer doesn't have a decompression utility.

The latest versions of Windows all have an unzip facility built in (just double click to open the contents). If you're running an older OS and haven't installed an alternate unzip utility (or can't, due to your school network) then take a look at the WobZip website. This free program runs over the Internet and will uncompress a zip archive on your computer or directly off a website if you feed it the URL. Very useful.

Ictopus

http://www.ictopus.org.uk/
A group of primary teachers, consultants and lecturers have recently launched Ictopus, a free ICT online primary support service. They plan on publishing a weekly "Sharing Good Practice" newsletter (issue 1 is available now) as well as provide downloadable lessons.

(While I was on the site I noticed this great link, in their news section, to give your students an idea what ancient Rome looked like.)

New Term

Hi everyone! It's the start of the new term here in the UK so I'm going to make a real effort to get this blog back up and running again. As always, I'm on the look out for interesting primary related links to include each day. If you've come across a great site (that I've not mentioned before) then please let me know about it.

If you're involved in primary education then why not pop along to the forums and join in the discussions? We have a great group of users who enjoy helping each other out, answering queries and sharing ideas.