Happy Friday everyone!

For the first time ever, today I am participating in the lovely doodlebugs linky party Five for Friday.



Here are the five things I have been up to this week:



I have new band for my Fitbit.



I love that I can change the bands into all different styles :) If you haven't heard of Fitbit before I highly recommend it. It is a small band you wear on your wrist and it records the steps you have taken each day, it also tells you how well you have slept. It can be linked up with other apps like MyFitnessPal to help if you are dieting and the one I use most it links to Pact which lets you earn money for walking! (Wow my freckles look blobby in this picture!)


I've been enjoying half term!



It is half term where I live so of course it is raining, but that cannot put a dampener on my good mood :) I have been trying to relax but I find it so hard to actually stop working!


I listed my first ever Bundle on TPT!



I haven't bundled products before so this is a new adventure for me.

It is a bundle of six science lesson with some of my favourite science products I am very proud of it. Please wander over and check it out here.






I started and finished a great book!


I have been reading After the Crash and I haven't been able to put it down! It really was gripping. My wonderful man brought me some books recently (I think books really are the most romantic present EVER!) I loved Gone Girl which led me to The Girl on the Train and now I've finished After the Crash very enjoyable but I have read all my new books now :( Oh well maybe I can get some more work done now I don't have my nose buried in books all the time. Is it just me that gets a little bit sad when I finish a really good book?




And saving the very best and most exciting for last.....



A very lovely friend of mine took me to The Mad Hatter's Tea Party at the Sanderson hotel in London. It was amazing with cute little cakes and sandwiches all in funny shapes and looking like characters from the story. There was an amazing selection of teas and at the end they brought out little plant pots filled with ice cream. It was so much fun, I cannot recommend it enough!

So I made it back from the seller event! (Only slightly tipsy!)

It was in a lovely little restaurant in Covent Garden. TES provided nibbles and drinks and it was really nice.

It was wonderful to meet so many other sellers and chat about the issue and excitement that comes with building an online business.

If you ever get the chance to go to one of these I highly recommend it.

It was after the couple of glasses of wine one of the TES team members asked if I wouldn't mind answering a few questions on camera.... I dread to think how that came out!

Over all lots of fun and they gave us some freebies! And a big thank you to the person who didn't want their freebie goodie bag because I offered to take it off the TES team's hands, I'm nice like that :)

Im blogging today from my phone. I'm on a train to London (isn't modern technology amazing). 

I'm all dressed up and super excited because.... Drum roll please..... I'm off to the TES seller event! 

I share and sell resources on TES my shop is here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources-shop/Charleei

I'm not completely sure what to expect but I will keep you all updated. 

Wish me luck :)

Oh and look at me blogging on the go - being all tech savvy! My teenager would be so proud, actually no scratch that she would just roll her eyes at me and make a disapproving noise. 

I'm going to start by saying that I am a huge fan of Pie Corbett. If you have never read or used his Talk for Writing methods, then get over to his page (http://www.talk4writing.co.uk) right now and don't come back until you have read the whole web site - all of it!

I mean look at him! How could you not be a fan???

Pie Corbett’s approach to literacy is fantastic and I was lucky enough to work for a while in a school which fully embraced the T4W approach. However, word hasn’t completely got out yet, lots of schools are still not quite on board with his methods and I think this is a real shame (but I will talk more about that in another blog post).



The basic idea behind T4W is that children need to be able to say words before they can write them; they need to approach their writing knowing they can draw on internalised structures and rhythms. Having a bank of stories and pieces of writing to fall back makes writing so much easier for children to start their own work.



Before I worked as a teacher I had my daughter (still have her in fact!) and sometimes at the worst possible moment she would demand a story, and not just any story, I wasn’t allowed to tell her the three little pigs from memory, she wanted new stories she had never heard before and they usually had to include her name. I would always start the story in the same way. ‘Once upon a time…’ the stories I would have to make up on the spot and tell her were surprisingly similar to the stories I read and had read to me growing up, there was the 3 little Jessica’s and the big mummy, who tried to put them to bed but they hid in huts made of straw, sticks and stones, sound familiar? Or the story of the little, cute, Jessica who wandered through the park on her own to see her friend but on the way met a big bad school teacher (again before I was that big bad teacher). All these stories had lots of storytelling language and structures.

Yes, I know my Photoshop skills are amazing!

I didn’t know it at the time but this way of story-telling is very important for children, they need to learn by heart these stories to later produce them on their own.



It is worrying when parents would rather give their child an iPad or let them watch TV than read to them but we as teachers can’t control this, we can control how much story telling children receive at school and that is important.

I did it! I finally finished the unit of work I've been working on for over three months! I'm not sure why it has taken me this long to finish, life gets in the way I guess and also I have been working full time and creating other products but it is done! And here it is:

This is my complete cross curricular unit of work on the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages!


It has 34 complete individual lessons covering things like, clothes, food, homes, hunting and art. Plus loads more. It hits all the NC requirements, with a big emphasis on historical enquiry. I'm really proud of it. (cue more, pictures)

If you want a look it is in my TPT store here and my TES store here.

Hmmmm I wonder what I should do now...... maybe the washing up.