Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences by Alan Peat

During 2013, we have begun using the Writing Exciting Sentences book by Alan Peat in our classrooms. We have found it to be a very useful resource and would recommend it to anyone who thinks it may be useful. As of May 2014, an accompanying app has been available.

To accompany the resource, we are about to start using dice as one way for children to, sometimes, choose which kind of sentence to write.

Idea 1: Each child has two dice. They roll them and then use this grid to decide which kind of sentence to write:

Idea 2: Cut of these cubes to make dice for the children to roll:

A copy of these documents can be found here.

Also, here's a game we made using Scratch. 

UPDATE - See our our post from 2014 about sentence dice by text type.

Maths: A Starter for Five

There are five days in a week, which for most of us means five maths lessons. Here are five maths starters we use in our classrooms (if you do a quick division, that means a different one each day). Also, although these have been called 'starters' we often use them mid-lesson too, or even at the end...

1 - Target Number

2 - Mental Calculation

3 - Countdown

4 - Tell Me More About...

5 - Kung Fu Maths

Click to see blog posts

The above are screen captures from SMART Notebook presentations we use in our maths lessons. An example of each is easy to set up in any presentation software and can then be easily adapted each day/week. If anyone would like a copy they can be found here.