1st Edition
Inspiring Primary Learners Insights and Inspiration Across the Curriculum
Inspiring Primary Learners offers trainee and qualified teachers high-quality case studies of outstanding practice in contemporary classrooms across the country. Expert authors unravel and reveal the theory and evidence that underpins lessons, helping you make connections with your own practice and understand what ‘excellent’ looks like, within each context, and how it is achieved.
Illustrated throughout with interviews, photos, and examples of children’s work, it covers a range of primary subjects and key topics including creating displays, outdoor learning, and developing a reading for pleasure culture. The voice of the practitioner is evident throughout as teachers share their own experience, difficulties, and solutions to ensure that children are inspired by their learning.
Written in two parts, the first exemplifies examples of practice for each National Curriculum subject, whilst the second focuses on the wider curriculum and explores issues pertinent to the primary classroom, highlighting important discussions on topics such as:
- Reading for pleasure
- Writing for pleasure
- Creating a dynamic and responsive curriculum
- Creating inspiring displays
- Outdoor learning
- Pedagogy for imagination
- Relationships and Sex Education
This key text shows how, even within the contested space of education, practitioners can inspire their primary learners through teaching with passion and purpose for the empowerment of the children in their class. For all new teachers, it provides advice and ideas for effective and engaging learning experiences across the curriculum.
Part 1: The primary curriculum
- Empowering communication through speaking, reading and writing
- A Teaching for Mastery Approach – Primary Mathematics
- Science: Children as inventors
- How ‘messiness’ in Design and Technology can inspire creative teaching and learning
- Putting the human back into the Humanities
- Painting a Canvas of Creativity
- Music: Composing, Performing, Listening and Structuring (all without fear)
- Physical Education and Health Education
- Computational thinking and technology enhanced learning (TEL): the power of computing in the primary classroom.
- Inspiración y oportunidad: purpose and strategies for teaching Modern Foreign Languages in the primary classroom
- Religious Education – a creative freedom to teach innovatively
- Relationships and Sex Education
- Reading for Pleasure
- Writing for Pleasure
- Creating a Dynamic and Responsive Curriculum
- Creating inspiring displays
- Outdoor learning
- Pedagogy for imagination
Deborah Reynolds, Sarah Smith and Kat Vallely
Gemma Parker
Adewale Magaji, Lorraine Smith and Michelle Best
James Archer and Rachel Linfield
Alison Hales
Ashley Brett
Mark Betteney and Kay Charlton
Kristy Howells
Poppy Gibson and Megan Brown
Poppy Gibson and Talia Ramadan
Robert Morgan
Part 2: Wider issues and debates
Richard Woolley and Sacha Mason
Roger McDonald
Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson
Janet Morris and Rachel Wolfendale
Anthony Barlow
Michelle Best, Adewale Magaji and Lorraine Smith
Roger McDonald
Biography
Roger McDonald is an Associate Professor at the University of Greenwich and has extensive experience in the primary classroom as a practitioner. Roger is also President Elect of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA).
Poppy Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich, and programme lead of the accelerated BA (Hons) in Primary Education Studies.
