Marshmallow catapults!

With just 4 marshmallows, 7 barbecue skewers, a rubber band, a plastic teaspoon and a strip of masking tape you can have yourself a maths, science and English lesson. 

Have a little chat about what a catapult is, where they've seen it and introduce your materials. Get the children to have a little turn trying to assemble it themselves then show them one, which may or may not look like the one in my illustration. 

As an English lesson, students can write a procedure on how to construct a catapult. In maths, measure distances of appropriate objects thrown from the catapult. In science, talk about potential to kinetic energy. 

This is probably best taught to children from Year 3s upward. 

Area game

An easy way for children to practise their multiplication skills whilst leaning about area is to give children 1 piece of grid paper between 2 and a pair of dice. 

They choose a different colour and colour in the timetable fact that corresponds to the numbers they rolled so, if they roll 4 and 6 they colour in a 4x6 area on their grid. The most prominent colour at the end wins. 

Acrostic poem arguments

I recently taught a Year 6 whose theme topic was rainforest. Their English text type was expositions so it was a perfect opportunity to tie the two in together with some research on what the biggest threats to the rainforest were. 

They then designed some posters to create awareness of their rainforest threat (visual arts) and used that as a reference to write their exposition. These students had plenty of information because they used an acrostic poem in their awareness poster. 

It's so great to use a theme across as many KLAs as possible to really incorporate as many of their strengths as possible as well as tap into their interests.