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. 

Playing card factors

I recently had a Year 5/6 class and played a fun, easily differentiated and quick set up activity.

Children pair up and get a deck of playing cards, each child picks one off the top and places down and place down, the first to work out the factor of these two keeps the cards. Person with the most cards wins. Jacks represent 11, Queens 12, King 13 and Ace 14- I put in the jokers as a zero card because people sometimes forget any number multiplied by zero is zero.

Kids who were whizzing through made it a bit harder by working in threes and finding the product of three factors. Simples. 

Wax resist spelling

It's nice to combine art with drier areas of the school day.

I like to do wax resist with white wax crayons and watercolour paint to do spelling words. It really facilitates the children's visualising a word before they write as well as their handwriting.

They need to grab a white piece of paper, write their word with white candles and then paint over with watercolour to reveal their words. It's quite a cool little magic trick younger years just love! 

Spelling battleships

This is a nice game to play in pairs. It's just like battleships except you use spelling words.

Each player chooses five different words to put on a word list. They keep the words secret from each other. 

Players then put their five words into their own grid. They can be any direction but backwards and can't overlap. The children then take turns calling out coordinates, such as A3 for example. If they call out a coordinate that has a letter in the box then the opponent must reveal that letter and say "hit". The child then writes down this letter in the coordinate of the partners word grid. If the coordinate called out is empty then the partner must say "miss" and the child colours in the box.

Players take it in turn calling out coordinates until they can take a guess at what the partners words are. If guessed correctly the word is "sunk". Once all words are sunk then you have a winner!

The morning show!

A nice little introduction to the day is to do a morning show. I just put one together on the interactive whiteboard each time I take a new class and chose a volunteer to help me do each slide.. It's also a good way to learn their names early. If I have time up my sleeve, I let them do a self register as they come in to. To show you how it all rolls out, I've put some example pictures that are similar to the slides I make up. For older kids it might be nice to have a puzzle or riddle for them to ponder on throughout the day as a fast finisher exercise too.