The Education Show (non-EdTech) Award for School Resources & Equipment for Teaching & Learning
Evidence Based Education – Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review
What are the ‘best bets’ for teachers to invest precious time and effort in to enhance the quality of classroom teaching and student learning? This is the question Evidence Based (EBE) Education set out to answer when creating the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review – a free resource for teachers and school leaders.
The fundamental goal of everyone that works in education is to improve students’ lives. While many personal, family, and cultural factors contribute to students’ outcomes, a large body of research indicates that what teachers do, know and believe matters more to the achievement of students than anything else we can influence. Raising the quality of teaching within existing schools is probably the single most effective thing that could promote both overall attainment and equity. EBE set out to identify, review and then summarise the best available evidence about what teachers’ practices, skills, knowledge and behaviours are important for students’ learning.
The aim of the resource is to help teachers more easily make better decisions about what they can best do to improve the quality of their teaching, and to support leaders to prioritise and structure the professional development of teachers.
Findel Education – Click-It Range
The Click It range is ideal to teach and reinforce essential literacy skills in children from EYFS up to Key Stage Two. Each chunky colour coded block is magnetic at each end, making it easy to build words and sentences. The Click It Jumbo Word Building Set contains giant, magnetic wooden tiles to use outside on a magnetic board. This is perfect for very young children to explore letters and words during outdoor active play time. Moving onto the Click It Word Building Sack, children use the blocks to build words, helping them to recognise the different phonic sounds, how to form words and broaden their vocabulary. The blocks are colour coded into vowels, consonants, digraphs and trigraphs. The Click It Word Building Cards can be used to encourage children to practise using phases 2 and 3 phonic sounds to build words. When children are ready to move on to forming sentences, they can use the Click It Sentence Building Sack to build on the skills they have learned to construct simple to more complex sentences containing high frequency words, punctuation and conjunctions. The blocks are colour coded into adjectives, nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, adverbs, verbs, interjections, prepositions, punctuation and articles.
Literacy Counts – Read to Write Foundations
Read to Write Foundations is a distinct and innovative resource that helps schools develop a sequenced, ambitious curriculum that places quality literature at its core. Read to Write Foundations provides a clear teaching sequence for writing through evidence-based approaches. These comprehensive termly resources match the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum and Development Matters 2021. They have an emphasis on providing practical ways for children to engage, explore and enjoy writing at their individual stage of development in the prime and specific areas of learning. This means that the resource is inclusive and supports all children on their writing journey. Read to Write Foundations provides a strong scaffold to support effective planning.
They also:
• have been developed specifically to support children on their writing journey towards the Literacy Early Learning Goals
• provide a strong planning scaffold for teachers
• empower teachers to teach a range of writing
• have a heightened focus on Daily Sentence Accuracy work
• are sequenced, coherent and progressive across the year
• have a clear focus on the skills and strategies needed to be a proficient and confident writer • help schools reach expectations for children at the end of EYFS”
Literacy Counts – Steps to Read
Steps to Read is a distinct and innovative planning resource that helps schools to deliver whole class Shared Reading through carefully crafted units of work. These units have been developed to make the greatest difference to children’s progression and promote a life-long love of reading, through language-rich, challenging texts. They are also vehicles to the wider curriculum. This, in turn, helps build a rich curriculum where a school’s Intent and Implementation leads to Impact through improved outcomes for children in reading.
The primary aim of Steps to Read is to teach reading comprehension skills and strategies explicitly. By also linking this teaching to foundation subjects, it helps children connect knowledge needed to access their curriculum whilst providing full curriculum reading coverage.
Rooted in school improvement, Steps to Read provides a sequenced, ambitious curriculum that matches the entire statutory requirements from Year 1 to Year 6. It also provides a consistent approach which allows leaders to support their teachers in their schools. This ensures the whole school community has a shared understanding of what it means to be a confident and competent reader, and how this can be achieved through successful curriculum implementation.
Maker’s Red Box – Maker’s Red Box
Using the power of storytelling and role-play, Maker’s Red Boxes help teachers turn children into avid makers and school labs into inspiring learning spaces. Each box includes carefully designed, STEAM-focused teaching materials with frame stories that transform students into astronauts, eco-engineers or superheroes, everyday tasks into playful challenges and gaining new knowledge into an effortless, collaborative experience.
Teachers can challenge children to combine 3D printing, microcontrollers, hand tools and laser cutters to turn their ideas into functioning objects – and find solutions to real-world problems. The boxes help them guide the creative process, let students gain transferable knowledge through hidden learning and become the thinkers, creators, problem-solvers and innovators that tomorrow’s workplaces will need.
Designed to engage and inspire children aged 11 to 16, Maker’s Red Box courses are best to spread out over 16 two-hour sessions. Our boxes contain everything teachers need to plan, prepare for and manage the classes, even if they have never written a single line of code or used a laser cutter before. They are based on epochal, constructivist, problem-based pedagogy and meet the learning requirements laid down in the natural science curriculum of both the UK and the US.
Picture News – Picture News
Picture News is a current affairs teaching resource for children aged 3-16. Each week a news story is covered through an engaging image, thought-provoking question and a variety of teaching resources. The resources are designed to provide opportunities for children to learn about and from our world. They encourage children to develop respect for others’ beliefs, feelings and faiths and explore, discuss, debate and challenge. Children learn more about themselves – their interests, talents and passions. They learn they have a voice and are inspired to impact our world and evoke change. Picture News allows children to feel valued, excited and engaged and it allows them to make connections with news stories and learn about themselves and others.
Picture News is fluid and versatile; there is no end point, no ceiling, no standing still and no set direction it must take. It is a resource that encourages creativity in children, teachers and schools and the opportunities it provides are endless.
The Literacy Company – Pathways Literacy
Pathways Literacy is a unique and innovative portfolio of programmes: Pathways to Write, Pathways to Read, Pathways to Home Learning, Pathways to Poetry, Pathways to Spell and Pathways to Progress. Each programme can be used independently but the portfolio is carefully woven together using skills from the national curriculum and the reformed EYFS framework. Each programme focuses on a finite number of skills that build progressively throughout the year, allowing pupils to develop confidence so that each skill can be mastered. This methodology sets the Pathways Literacy portfolio of programmes apart from other products available to schools.
Pathways Literacy offers high quality resources with inclusivity at its heart from clear guidance for all pupils to clear support for parents or mixed age planning to support smaller schools. The impact of these research-based programmes is evident from school feedback and from Ofsted reports. Customer care is second to none with a dedicated business support team and consultants who care passionately about outcomes for children; all of the latter having been teachers themselves so they fully understand the needs of education and schools. Users can expect high quality customer service alongside a top-quality product.”
The Literacy Tree – The Literary Curriculum
The Literary Curriculum is an online resource for primary schools looking for an innovative, creative and immersive book-based approach to primary English. As a whole-school approach, with a school membership, it provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, grammar, punctuation, spelling and reading comprehension. Individual membership is also available where tokens can be exchanged for resources .
