✨ Take what you need this week!

Welcome to your weekly POWER Up! I’m here to support you with simple, actionable strategies, ideas, resources and freebies!

P = Personal 💁🏼‍♀️

So Ollie officially started walking... buuuut two days later he's mostly gone back to crawling because, in his expert opinion, it's faster and more reliable haha.

I also spent the weekend at Mum and Dad's sorting through every box of teaching stuff I'd left there when I left the classroom a few years ago. How do teachers accumulate so much stuff?!

I've donated/recycled/chucked a fair bit (soooo satisfying) and turned the rest into a pretty epic (in my humble opinion) playroom for all the grandkids... the lucky ducks!!

O = On the 'gram 📲

In case you missed it, here's what's been popular over on Instagram lately.

• ​The "good teacher" BS I'm not falling for anymore​
• ​A child's brain is not a camera (why sight words don't stick) *
• ​Parent culture in schools that gives me the ick​
• ​Classroom management BS I'm not falling for​

Includes freebies

W = What's trending?📈

It's National Simultaneous Storytime tomorrow!

Not only do we have 3 x stinking cute book crafts, but we also have differentiated literacy activities, mathematics activities, design prompts, editable PowerPoint slides to support every activity AND animal fact files that are directly linked to the Aussie animals in the book!

All differentiated so they work across any grade level. And yes, this entire pack is free for every teacher!
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➜ Download your free Luna Roo resources here. ​
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​Hive members, don't forget you can also access the exclusive video from the authors - just head to the Video Library and search "Luna Roo"

E = Education Tip 💡

If your writers are stuck in "then... then... then..." land, the issue isn't usually their ideas or their vocab. It's their sentence-level toolkit.

Strong writers in upper primary have more sentence-level moves at their disposal. Things like:

• adding a clause for detail
• starting a sentence with an adverbial phrase
• linking two ideas with a conjunction
• reaching for a more precise verb

None of these things happen by accident, and none of them happen through exposure to good writing alone. They all need to be taught explicitly.

Instead of telling a writer their sentence needs "more detail," you teach them the specific move that adds detail (e.g. an adjectival clause), then give them lots and lots of opportunities to do exactly that.

That can take a paragraph like this:

The dragon was big. Then it flew over the castle. Then it breathed fire. Then the knight ran away.

To something more like this:

When the brave knight charged forward with his battered shield, the enormous dragon, whose jagged scales shimmered like molten gold, unleashed a blazing torrent of fire across the cobbled stone courtyard.

Same kid. Same story. Different toolkit.

R = Resource Spotlight 🔦

Which is exactly why we've spent the past few months building out a complete sentence-level toolkit for Years 3-4.

Last week we dropped the first round of resources — adjectival clauses, adverbs and adverbial phrases, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, verbs and verb groups, cause and effect, and sentence types.

And yes, as always, I've included lots of freebies to get you started! You can check them out here!

And.... a Year 5-6 drop is hot on its heels.

Have a wonderful rest of the week, and LOTS of fun if you're taking part in NSS on Wednesday!

Love,

Tam

P.S. Jez has been busy. Two brand new generators have just landed inside The Hive - a handwriting worksheet generator and Read and Roll/Read and Write. If you're not yet a Hive member, start a 14-day free trial here and have a play! Plenty more goodness is also on the way!