Tag: #teachingresources

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I’m back! News & Updates

Line drawing of woman at laptop with words"I'm back, news and updates".
Line drawing of woman at laptop and words "I'm back, news and updates".

For anyone who has checked in to this site over the last couple of years I apologise for neglecting it! Seeing the last blog post about dice games reminds me of the time I worked on that resource when I was caring for my mother in her last days. More recently I have been spending lots of time supporting my father. Moving home was a long drawn out process that meant I was unable to commit to long term work so it has been hard to focus. I say this not for sympathy or an excuse, but in recognition that we all have so much going on in our lives. This is why with Teachers Telling Tales I aspire to provide quality resources that are free or affordable; to ease the workload of educators, who have so many other demands on their time and energy.

It has been so rewarding to see that it has been self sustaining. The amount of downloads from tes.com has now surpassed 10,000, and although I don’t know the exact figure for Teachers pay Teachers, it will be much higher than tes; this makes me feel so proud.

Encouraging statistics from tes! September 2024

Although tes is mainly used by educators in the UK, it’s also interesting to see from the map that there are fans around the world.

Free downloads from tes over the last quarter, September 2024

Since starting Teachers Telling Tales in mid 2019 there have been so many changes globally and in my little world; when the pandemic struck I left my nomadic lifestyle in Asia to settle back in the UK and be close to family. After a series of temporary accommodation I rented a flat overlooking the most congested (and surely one of the most chaotic) streets in Bristol, then in July I moved to new home in Cardiff. My unsettled life meant a series of temporary work roles including support roles in schools, nurseries and a pupil referral unit. I worked as a tutor in schools, online and in an adult education centre with learners that were mostly refugees or asylum seekers.

Throughout all that time it has been reassuring to see the steady flow of visitors to this site and the Teachers Telling Tales social media and stores despite my lack of input recently. Thank you! I do hope to write blogs more often and add more resources. It takes time to polish them to a high standard for sharing, but now that I’m finally settling hopefully that will happen!

So what’s new?
I am launching my own tutoring service. I love the creative challenge of curating lessons to meet the needs of students, whether it’s to understand a maths topic, build confidence in exam technique or develop a love of creative writing. The satisfaction of hearing that a child you tutored had the pick of both schools they applied to after eleven plus tutoring or the student with ADHD doing a happy dance after the session because they didn’t think they would manage 30 minutes but completed an hour. I love how it’s possible to build the learning around their favourite subject, whether it’s axolotls, Disney princesses or constellations. It has been great to draw on some Teachers Telling Tales resources for my sessions and I’m looking forward to the tutoring sessions inspiring more resources to share.

A screenshot of a child's advertisement for an ice lolly. Features colourful drawing, persuasive language features and adjectives.
Persuasive language and adjective work using Teachers Telling Tales’ Delicious Description’ pack
A screenshot of a child's work featuring a phone with speech bubbles showing text messages created between the fairy godmother and Cinderella.
A screenshot of a child's work showing dialogue created between Elsa and Rapunzel first in the form of text messages, then converted to direct speech in a story.

The Teachers Telling Tales ‘If Fairy Tales Had Phones’ resource in action during online tuition to develop dialogue and convert speech bubbles to direct speech.

If you are looking for a tutor for child, or know someone who is, please take a look at my website http://fiona.tutorbird.com and get in touch.

Logo featuring a line drawing of a tutor at a laptop and the words 'Tutoring with Fiona'.

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Roll, Play! Dice Learning Games

Inexpensive, easily portable and with endless possibilities for games, dice are an essential in the educator’s toolbox. They are adaptable for differing ages and abilities and transcend language barriers.

A small tub full of dice is relatively cheap, light to carry and has endless possibilities!

Dicebreaker!

Last year, I had a wonderful experience supporting with some refugee children from Afghanistan on their first days in a school in Bristol. A boy, about seven years old was wary of joining the other children; he stayed at the back of the class and took his time to observe the class and get his bearings. Finally, I engaged him through rolling large dice together. Without any shared language, we soon established a simple game that whoever rolled the highest was the winner. Soon we were exclaiming our triumph or disappointment in our own languages, learning numbers and most importantly, sharing smiles and laughter. It got me thinking about the potential of dice for play and learning and interested in their history.

In this blog, I will outline some facts about dice, tips for using them and links to resources.

Did you know the dots on dice are known as ‘pips’? Read on for more facts about dice and tips for using them in learning games.

Top Tips

Choosing Dice

As well as the traditional 6-sided die, dice come in a range of materials, shapes with varying numbers of faces and corresponding pips, numbers or symbols.
Materials: I bought my favourite set of dice while teaching in Cambodia, they are hand made in colourful cotton. Large and soft enough to play with indoors and outdoors and perfect for younger children. While working in a volunteer team in the Maldives, we produced a resource pack of dice games for schools and the teachers made dice using offcuts of wood. While I generally prefer natural materials for learning resources, in the case of dice I find plastic is a good choice – it’s durable and easy to clean. The colourful, transparent dice are attractive to children. Interestingly, did you know casinos often use transparent dice to show that they are not loaded?

Shapes and Numbers

As well as the standard traditional six-sided cube with dots (pips), there are other common shapes and numbers available, including:
– tetrahedron (4 faces)
– octahedron (8 faces)
– pentagonal trapezohedron (10 faces)
– dodecahedron (12 faces)
– icosahedron (20 faces).

Traditional dice with dots enable children to practise the important skill of subitising, (learning to visualise numbers and recognise amounts without counting). Dice with numerals are also useful for number recognition. Having dice including zero and / or with numbers up to twelve is good for times tables games.

Adaptations:
– Add stickers to cover existing numbers and make the numbers lower or higher.
– Make your own dice using net templates (see download link below).
– Order custom dice.
– For visually impaired learners tactile dice can be made or purchased.

D-eyes! maker and photographer unknown

Tips for Playing Dice Games

Remote Teaching?

Use an online random dice generator:

calculator.net allows you to choose any number of dice to roll, vary the numbers of sides on the dice and find the sum and product.

online-stopwatch.com has a fantastic range of dice, including a shaker and my favourite, the pop-up die.

Ideas and Resources

Dice are just random generators; as well as numbers they can also feature words or pictures making them a valuable tool for a range of activities and subjects. For example, the My Amazing Monster resource pack I created uses dice to generate a monster name as a phonics activity and to select story elements for a creative writing exercise.
However, the area where dice really shine is in mathematics. There are so many games that can be played where maths skills can be sneaked in almost without students noticing!

When I started online tutoring in 2020, I incorporated lots of dice games into sessions as they made great starters, brain breaks or upbeat ways to end lessons. Now that I am delivering tuition in schools I have continued to use them; finding and adapting more games along the way. I have compiled the games I found, adapted and created into a document for easy reference. It can be cropped into 30 cards for easy reference, perfect for giving to adults working with a group in class. As well as simple instructions, the cards have suggestions for variations to make games simpler or more challenging to meet the needs of students.
Skills include: calculation using all four operations, comparing numbers, place value, doubling, odd and even numbers, times tables, square numbers, number bonds, probability, rounding, power of 10, negative numbers, fractions, sequences, area and perimeter.

To purchase the Roll, Play! dice games pack go to your chosen store, Teachers pay Teachers or Tes from the links on the home page.

Top of the Pips – for the fact fans!

Links

Check out the Teachers Telling Tales Pinterest board for these and additional links / ideas.

Dice Games:
https://icebreakerideas.com/dice-games/
https://the-teacher-next-door.com/math-games-using-dice/
https://numberdyslexia.com/dice-games-to-teach-multiplication-facts/
https://openiun.com/fun-and-easy-dice-games-to-play/
https://www.goldencarers.com/6-fun-easy-dice-games-for-the-elderly/6622/
https://www.math-salamanders.com/math-games-using-dice.html
https://www.mentalmathworksheets.org/math-dice-games/



Make your own dice: printableshub.com
Tactile dice for visually impaired: https://shop.rnib.org.uk/leisure/indoor-games/dice, https://www.shapeways.com/shops/dots-rpg-project-dice-shop
Online dice: https://www.online-stopwatch.com/online-dice/, https://www.calculator.net/dice-roller.html

Facts about Dice:
https://www.onlineunitedstatescasinos.com/blog/national-dice-day-7-fun-facts-about-dice-you-didnt-know-23936/
https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/history-of-dice
verybesttop10.com/facts-you-might-not-know-about-dice/
https://www.gmdice.com/blogs/dnd/how-are-dice-made
https://fact.directory/dice-facts

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Pollution Peril, a fishy tale!

An interactive story to illustrate water pollution and its impacts

I came across this fantastic idea while working as an environmental educator in Belize, (see references below). I went on to share it with educators and students I worked with in the Philippines and Fiji Islands as I love how it actively engages students in telling the story and provides a strong visual impression of the problem. I have since updated it with Causes and Consequences cards and photographs to make the instructions clearer.

  • A sponge fish in a jar of clean water.
    clean water
  • A sponge fish in a jar of dirty water with floating rubbish.
    polluted water

The story involves a fish travelling from its home through connected ecosystems and encountering different sources of water pollution in each. Substances like soil and soy sauce are added to the water to represent the pollutants and students consider the effect on the fish. At the end they discuss whether the fish will survive and whether it would be safe to eat it, making the link to how pollution also effects humans. A great follow up activity is asking the students to the to remove the pollutants from the water. Other ideas could be exploring how to prevent pollution at source or creating a story map.

If you would like a free download of the lesson plan including instructions, cards and editable scripts go to one of the Teachers Telling Tales online stores:

Teachers pay Teachers

tes

screenshots of some of the files included in the free pack

References

This activity is adapted from ‘Fishy Tales’ lesson in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef Systems (MBRS) Project guide for primary schools. They cite their source as: Utah Lesson Plans, adapted from Chilton-Stringham, P., Wolanin, J., (1995). Water, Stones, and Fossil Bones. “Fred the Fish.”

Vocabulary

To dive deeper into the vocabulary linked to water pollution, take a look at an example of a quiz on Quizlet

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Adapting to Digital Learning, try Easel by TpT

A child with a laptop on the sofa and title: Adapt to digital learning, it's easy with Easel.
A picture of a child on a sofa with a laptop. Text reads: Adapt to digital learning? It's easy with Easel!

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Have you used Easel by Teachers pay Teachers for distance or digital learning? Although I taught remotely from January to July and share resources on TpT, I didn’t start to explore Easel by TpT until the summer holidays. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use and impressed with its potential to create engaging resources.

Having spent a great deal of time searching for suitable resources and adapting them for online teaching, I was interested to see how Easel could make this process more effective and streamlined.

Some screenshots from my online sessions this year.

(see below for links to updates of these resources)

How Easel by TpT works:

Creating and Converting Resources.
Easel is a simple and straightforward way to create or convert worksheets or assessments. Simply upload a PDF or create a blank page, then add images, and text instructions. You can then add movable objects (words or images) or answer boxes. Students can annotate using type, pen and highlight tools. As work is set individually, it’s great for differentiation. For live lessons, it is possible to use the ‘view as pupil’ preview mode as a digital whiteboard through screen sharing.

If you share resources on TpT, you’ll see that there is the option to opt in PDF files.
For documents within a zip file you need to add Easel files, I tried and it’s easy to do.
I recommend watching this video and having a go!

Sourcing Resources
There are thousands of ready-made Easel activities and assessments listed on TpT, you can tick the box to filter for these in your search. You will see a tick and ‘Easel activity’ when you select a resource in the format section. You can customise the files to suit your needs.

Will Digital Learning Decline Alongside Covid?

Are Easel resources likely to become redundant as we recover from the pandemic?

I don’t think so. Of course, we’re all hoping for face-to-face teaching in the future, but should we need to teach remotely again, we will be so much better prepared. It’s certainly worth selecting resources that have Easel files in case. This article outlines how it is a good idea to have parallel plans; the in class resources and a parallel set in case learning needs to be completed at home.
Digital resources also have so much potential for use in a range of circumstances such as for homework, to be completed on tablets or computers in class (this may make learning more accessible for some children), for tutoring and sending work home.

If you would like ideas for teaching online and using Easel, you may find this blog helpful.

If you’d like to try out some Easel activities, here are some of my free ones, (links below):

Free Resources with Easel Files

  • The cover image of a teaching pack, Hooray for Fish pattern and shape tracing. Shows worksheets.
Free Teachers Telling Tales resources with Easel activities

All of these free activities have linked paid resources, many of which now have been updated with Easel files.

Updated Resources with Easel Files

  • preview image of resource showing screenshots of worksheets
  • Title: If fairytales had phones. Image of Little Red Riding Hood with mobile phone.
  • A picture of an octopus, spider and ladybug wearing socks
  • screenshots of teaching resources on positional language
  • screenshots of fish opposites teaching resources
  • screenshots of teaching resources
  • screenshots of sudoku and sequencing activities featuring minibeasts
Teaching resources updated with Easel files

Links to Resources:

New Resources with Easel Files

I am currently in the process of polishing the resources I created for online teaching to share; where relevant I will try to create Easel versions for all new resources.
Here are the first batch I’ve uploaded: Monster Balloon Party games, My Amazing Monster literacy lesson, Little Monster Balloon Party games, Count the Coins challenges, Place Value Problems,.

New resources with Easel files from Teachers Telling Tales


I’d love to know your experiences with Easel and online learning. Please share your thoughts or tips in the comments.

Teachers pay Teachers Tips

If you’re new to TpT, there’s a few features it’s good to know about:

  • Follow stores. Many (like Teachers Telling Tales!) discount new resources by up to 20% when they are first uploaded.
  • Earn credit. After trying a resource leave a review to earn credits for future purchases. (It also brings a big smile to the face of the creator and may even prompt a happy dance!)
  • Subscribe to the newsletter. It comes every Sunday with 10 freebies, links to blogs and details of any sales (which happen quite often).
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A ‘How to’ for Teaching Homophones: tips and tools

Question: Which fruit sounds like it should come in twos? Answer: Pears!

I have been planning lessons for the UK National Tutoring Programme which has been put in place to help students catch up with some of the curriculum content they may have missed due to Covid19. For one cohort of students my focus is on spelling.
Homophones feature prominently in the UK spelling guidance, (see link below), beginning in Year 2 and continuing through to Years 5 and 6 (age 10-11). They can be very confusing, so I decided to look into how to support students with learning them.

What is a Homophone?

The word homophone comes from two Greek words that have been put together – homo meaning ‘same and and phone meaning ‘sound’. Put simply, they words that sound the same, but with different meanings and spellings.

While there are many pairs of homophones, there are some with multiple words, for example, the commonly confused to, two and too.

 What did one homophone say to comfort the other homophone?

Their, there, they’re.

Resource Development

I was really inspired by the wonderful images created by Bruce Holden in his blog, Homophones, Weakly and had so much fun creating my own pairs of images in a similar style. As I wanted to use the images to engage children, I added the jigsaw element and bright colours then created versions without words for quiz activities.

A banner showing pictures to represent pairs of homophones, e.g.which witch.
Can you guess all the homophone puzzle pairs? Image by Teachers Telling Tales.

Resource Aims:

  • To engage children and make learning fun
  • To succeed in helping children with spelling

To make lessons enjoyable, they use quiz and games formats. Homophones are also great for incorporating humour in the form of jokes, riddles and tongue twisters. To give children the tools to support spelling, I built in mnemonic activities.

Mnemonics

A mnemonic is a tool for remembering. There are lots of these for spelling including acrostics, small words in big words, rules and so on.

Creating a visual image can help with recall. As well as sharing mnemonics, creating them is a powerful way to fix them in the mind.

Resource Packs by Teachers Telling Tales

Homophones teaching resources available from Teachers Telling Tales

Pairs or Pears Homophone Games

Making learning fun through games, find pairs, match, cover, cut paste and label.
Cards with pictures only, words only and both pictures and words by Teachers Telling Tales.
Colour, black and white and ink saving versions featuring 40 words.

Which Witch Homophones Quiz

Which Witch, by Teachers Telling Tales, presenter view

As I had created twenty pairs of images, I decided to split these into two quiz presentations so it would not be too long for students. There are two versions of the presentation:
Annotate, with just pictures. This is more challenging for spelling!
Label, where words are provided and can be dragged to the correct picture.
The introduction is tongue twisters and the activity at the end is to create a mnemonic.

You can purchase both resources together at a discount, available from Teachers Telling Tales online stores at:
Teachers Pay Teachers
TES

Useful Links:

UK Statutory Guidance publications
Homophone resources (lists, jokes, riddles, quizzes, flash cards, worksheets and more

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Socks Rock!

Any suggestions for songs by The Odd Socks?! Illustration Fiona Childs.

What are your favourite themes for projects?
I love project based learning with a theme that feeds into cross curricular exploration and ‘socks’ is one of my faves!
Socks are familiar to every student, everyone has their opinions about them and they lend themselves perfectly to creative and mathematical investigations and challenges.

An illustration demonstrating how a socks topic can help with teacher number concepts to young children.
illustration Fiona Childs, Teachers Telling Tales
An illustration of how a socks topic can be used to teach aspects of patterns.
illustration Fiona Childs, Teachers Telling Tales
Rhyme and word play examples related to socks (itsy bitsy spider socks, fox in socks, sock-topus)
illustration Fiona Childs, Teachers Telling Tales

Pairs

As socks come in pairs they lend themselves to paired activities which, in turn, are great for deepening communication and collaboration skills. For example, designing a matching pair of socks using stickers and drawings to create a pattern. Students add elements to the design for their partner to match. To make it more challenging, students can describe what they are doing without their partner being able to see. It’s lots of fun!

Paired activity to create matching socks.
Great for communication, collaboration, symmetry, shape, colour, position.

Awareness and Wellbeing Days

There are two main international awareness days that use socks as a focus:
1. #oddsocksday on November 16th as part of Anti-Bullying Week. Learn more and download resources here:

https://www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/anti-bullying-week/odd-socks-day/odd-socks-day-2020

2. #LotsOfSocksDay on Down Syndrome Day, 21st March. Learn more here:

https://www.worlddownsyndromeday2.org/

Holding a Crazy Socks or Silly Socks Day has become popular for spirit days and for awareness and fund raising events as it’s a simple but fun way to get everyone involved.

Teaching Resources

I have had a lot of fun creating a range of resources inspired by socks using the themes listed above: patterns, counting, matching, design etc. As usual they are available from the tes online shop and Teachers Pay Teachers online store (see buttons on home page).
There’s a free pack and options to get all the packs in a bundle at a discounted price.


If you try them please remember to add a quick review and any pictures of the resources in action or finished work would be much appreciated!
For more patterns ideas follow this Pinterest board: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/teacherstellingtales/patterns/