21st January 2024

 

Jan Garen at Wales Ape and Monkey Sanctuary in Swansea Valley has produced a new Chimpanzees Biography Booklet together with a series of related issues activities: felling of hardwoods, bauxite mining, cocoa etc. Useful for visiting sanctuary, but also excellent for further study in school. We're planning more activities to go with the booklet.

 

22nd June 2023

 

We are celebrating Windrush Day by inviting your help in revising our current Empire characters activity. Please send us more characters to include in both this historical and our planned "new" empire activity of shady characters laundering money.

 

24th May 2023

 

We are sorry that we did not include squeeze and wriggle in our Monster Motion activity.The SATs monsters took advantage. They are now included. We nearly have enough motion words to make a second game. Please keep on sending us new words.

 

22nd December 2022

Horror is our focus at the moment and we welcome your suggestions and comments! We are extending our gothic and horror range by developing an "Introduce Me' activities for ghouls, imps, boggarts etc and a "horror props" game creating stories around severed fingers, mists, old unopened rooms etc.

Many thanks to English colleagues for the positive feedback on our Gothic Story Kit.

 

 

Here are our drafty horror activities waiting for your additions and suggestions!

 

7th July 2022

More activities from the EAL team in Rochdale and more to come! We hope you can think up more activities to support Mantra books.

 

9th April 2022

In the pipeline...

Email us if you would like to help to develop and/or try out these activities.

 

We are updating our Supply Chain activity with a focus on sustainable trainers. We were inspired by the recent publicity around ournew PM's choice.

Continuing our work on Primates, Jan Garen from Wales Ape and Monkey, has devised an activity about the influence of monkeys on Japanese culture.

We visited the medieval barn in Harmondsworth (next door to Heathrow Airport) and plan to adapt the work we started with Bradford on Avon.

22nd March 2022

We have now added Macaques to our primates Introduce Me activities.

 

11th March 2022

We have added two activities on baboons; one historical and the other a science and geography activity.

 

Both of these activities are templates for further development work, so we hope you will be inspired to produce similar activities and share them with us. Show us some of your minibooks!

22nd January 2022

We have tweaked the English version of our Runaway Pea games and hope you can help us with the other language versions! More languages are on the way when we have translations and fonts. Would you like to help?

 

4th January 2022

French, Czech, Albanian and Spanish are now added. Bengali and Arabic are also here.

Click on the book cover for the English version.

 

14th December 2021

Booktrust has given a copy of the Runaway Pea to every school in England and Northern Ireland. Do you know who has yours? Link to the English version of our games on the right and here is the Romanian version. and the Polish version.

 

We have made a new guide to minibooks. Please send us your ideas and examples of books you have made.

Link on the right!

We are tweaking activities suitable for the restraints on contact brought about by the virus. This dates activity with linking mapwork allows groups to work together and then present their findings and questions to the other groups or the rest of the class. It could be adapted to other topics and we are working on something similar for our Polish British connections work. See below!

 

Calling Polish colleagues and their students! We are putting together Polish history activities showing links with Britain going back to the Middle Ages. We cannot complete this without your help.

Please contribute to the update of our Black history resources, which were driven out of the curriculum and now will return with strength and vigour.

 

VIRUS ACTIVITIES UPDATE

Germ Warfare is now updated but we would welcome more ideas and pictures. Four (five?) more virus activities are now developed based on this booklet on the Immune System. The first one is on the right. We hope you can help us complete it quickly. Two useful bits of virus information can be found in our newsletter.

Below is a link to our Ebola activity.

Activity 2

Virus Sort is about contagion and is now posted. Thank you for the positive feedback and suggestions.

Activity 3

Viruses are very (very) small. This activity is an attempt to develop an awareness of and discussion around small things and relative size.

 

 

 

 

Tested out at NALDIC conference on 16th November 2019. We would like to thank colleagues who took the bait and tried out our clandestine CPD. The activity is now on line. We planned another clandestine activity for the cancelled NALDIC CONFERENCE on 16th November 2020, which is still waiting in limbo for the next NALDIC conference that takes place in real place and time.

 

 

We are developing a new activity about Amazon (not the river, we've already done that, but the fulfilment folk who are currently doing very well out of the virus) and not sharing their profits. There is a link on the left to Tim Hunkin's take on this which inspired us; together with a detailed report in the New Yorker.

We are also updating our Whitechapel Road activity which can be adapted to any street in your local area.

P.S. The proposed plan to permanently close the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and turn it into a boutique themed hotel is faltering despite the developers' support from the government.

Last year we developed activities to support the teaching around the British Empire. We have already developed a trade goods activity suited to KS2 which also works for KS3/4. We are now working on an activity to meet characters linked the the development of empire and we are planning a new activity on the current "secret" British Empire of money laundering and tax evasion.
We heard a head (probably one of those executive ones that have never worked in Early Years or may never have taught a class!) say recently that there was too much play in her setting! We thoroughly disagree!! We are optimistically reviving big board games we developed in the "Age of Invention" early 1980s* to provide phonic relief and push sound early years practice up the age range.
This activity, to encourage children to talk about books they have read with each other, needs updating to include books that are currently popular at KS2. Can you please suggest titles?
We have mined this from the archive to help with our virus work and would welcome comments, suggestions and drawings. Pupils produced our current versions and we welcome more.
These two food activities are currently being enlarged and made more suitable for younger pupils. Please try them out and feed back your ideas.
We would welcome more ideas for extending the mental maths games below:
Hwaet! We have tweaked our medieval "Then and Now" activity to suit Y3's study of Anglo Saxons.
This timeline activity could be tweaked to lead from the present back to whenever you want to be. However, be prepared for a long line to the Stone Age.Our activity has seventeen parts at the moment. Will work well with bubbles developing socially distanced presentations.
Lots of mapping and work with coordinates. A potential candidate for a class assembly or a Zoomy presentation.
We have come up with an activity that looks at hurricanes, tax havens and aid.
*"Age of Invention" from Simon Gibbons' book "English and Its Teachers" on the history of English Education in England. Let's get back to invention and creativity!

Currently we are stuck in the "Age of Intervention" Will the current situation help us escape or dig us in deeper?

This link will take you back to the top of the page:

 

Thank you for reaching the bottom! And big thanks to everyone who is helping us with these activities and suggesting more.