Titanic teaching resources

100 years on from the sinking of the Titanic and another maritime disaster has just occurred as an almsot ironic reminder to us all, as we are about to commemorate the centenary.

While designing the teaching resources for Pencil Street, we did wonder if any family had been unfortunate enough to have had relatives who had been onboard the Titanic in 1912 and had also had any current family members onboard the Costa Concordia.

We hope the Pencil Street Titanic resources are stimulating and thought-provoking - whilst approaching the topic in a sensitive manner suitable for primary school children.

Rocks and Soils - KS2 Primary Science

Giant's Causeway - Basalt Columns

The first week of January was spent researching the science topic on rocks and soils supporting the KS2 Science QCA schemes of work unit 3D. It is a popular science subject for Year 3 and often done in Year 4 in primary schools.

The Pencil Street office has a soil separation experiment sitting on the window sill and two soil core samples taken from the office garden. One of which included a worm that had made an appearance some time after bringing into the office, freaking out some of the staff!

A lot of information was gathered to try and portray an interesting, but factually correct set of science worksheets and classroom displays to support this topic. It was interesting to note different classifications, on school worksheets out there, that exist on particle sizes for clay. We used the ISO 14688 classification in the end, which grades clay particles as being smaller than 0.002 mm. and silts as larger.

Karl Jenkins

Pencil Street

Olympic Worksheets

The 2012 Summer Olympic Games, officially known as the Games of the XXX Olympiad are due to take place in London from 27 July to 12 August 2012.

The development of the Pencil Street teaching resources covering the Olympic Games started in September 2011, with the clear aim to provide quality Olympic teaching resources, rich in learning content for primary school classrooms.

Helping teachers by providing Olympic worksheets, which are cross-curricular and easily slotted into the timetable, but also fun in content was no small task.  Resources include and are not limited to:

• Olympic history worksheets
• Olympic geography worksheets
• Olympic maths worksheets
• Olympic comprehension literacy worksheets
• Olympic art and design activities

Pencil Street will also be providing Paralympic resources which will be available on the Pencil Street website during March 2012.

Lucy Sutton

The Pencil Street Design Team

www.pencilstreet.org

Holocaust Teaching Resources for KS2 Children

Today I had to upgrade the Pencil Street Holocaust teaching materials for KS2 history. I found this an emotionally difficult topic to cover.

However, I felt we should cover this very sensitive topic well. It is a vitally important, if not somewhat disturbing period of our history, which children should learn about. (The topic is normally covered in KS3 as part of the QCA schemes of work unit 19 – How and why did the Holocaust happen?)

With Holocaust Memorial Day in January and several requests by teachers to cover this section of World War II in greater depth, for KS2 children – I pray I have done the topic justice.

Anita Solomon - Resource Designer

www.pencilstreet.org

Note: World War II is normally covered as a KS2 topic following QCA schemes of work unit 9.