Whatever internal system you use for assessing writing, come May year 6 teachers will be using the Interim Teacher Assessment Framework to decide whether a child is 'Working towards', 'Working at', or 'Working at a greater depth'. Many teachers, like myself, may already be using this to assess writing, building up an evidence base of what each child can do to support end of year assessments. However, finding out what a child can't yet do is so much more useful. A great number of the statements focus on spelling and grammar. Whilst some may argue that this is... (Read More)

How do you teach grammar? Do you teach grammar? When I went to school, sure we were taught about capital letters and full stops and I guess someone must have spoken to me about verb tense agreement, or at least I thinked they didded! What I do know though is that I was never taught it in a formal way as is required now and I certainly never had to sit a grammar test. Schools are only a few years into the new grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) test so it's fair to assume that schools are still exploring the best ways of teaching these skills. Of course, close integration with readi... (Read More)

Every year I run an after school mental maths club for children in year 6. It started off as part of our intervention in the lead up to SATs and proved to be really successful. As a result, we've done it every year since. Although this year we've got a smaller group than usual, in the past we've had between 20 and 30 children staying behind after school for an hour to practice mental maths. So how have we managed to keep them there? I'd say there are three main reasons: make it fun, keep it fast paced and of course, include sweets! Here are some top tips if you're thin... (Read More)