The Teaching Patch

25/08/2026

I have been supporting a child in Y2 with EAL over several sessions to write an innovated narrative.
Did she know this traditional tale? No.
Did she know what a turnip was? No.

Now she knows...
✅️The names of lots of vegetables and how to
spell them
✅️Time related phrases, e.g. That night...
✅️Synonyms for 'big'
✅️A narrative blueprint story structure
✅️New vocab such as 'sowed' and 'harvest'

If you think this sounds useful, I'm also the founder of The Teaching Bookshelf and have written hundreds of teaching sequences and resources like these to support primary teachers in delivering effective English curriculums.

Head over and give me a follow or check out my website: www.teachingbookshelf.com

23/08/2026

The transition from Early Years to Year 1 can be a big jump for some children, particularly children who have not met Early Learning Goals or reached GLD. For children who are not ready for whole class teaching at the start of KS1, this model bridges the gap between a play-based curriculum in Reception and a more formal curriculum in Year 1.
All of the Autumn Term sequences have been adapted to provide you with the option of using a transition model.
Download your next unit an all the accompanying resources for £5.99
www.teachingbookshelf.com

22/08/2026

How do you develop reading fluency?

Once a child has secured some GPCs then you can teach them to blend sounds they know to decide words.

Repeated practice reading words in sentences that contain the sounds they've learned is crucial to success and building confidence.

Modelling fluency and echo reading helps to build prosody and fluency.

This child is in year 2. We've done a lot of work on reading and learning common exception words by heart ❤️

He was stuck on the digraphs at phase 3, so I began there, helping him to secure the sounds he didn't know through lots and lots of different games. And now we're reading sentences 💥🙌👏

Give me a follow or save this post for more tips and tricks. 💛

20/08/2026

13/08/2026

Done for the weekend 😘

12/08/2026

Tonight's lesson: making Top Trumps Cards from The Guardian's Bestiary at the back of the book. Absolute favourite fact: The Kanko nest in inconvenient places - in shoes, hats, pockets, and the beard of a gentleman on the day of his wedding! Katherine Rundell you are a true inspiration! thank you for all the planning, resources and ideas 💡 🧡

03/08/2026

Supporting a Y10 IGCSE student with sentence stems to support the organisation of her essays when analysing language and structure of a focus text.

I find most students just need a bank of familiar sentence starters to give them a framework to structure their writing really helps them.

They have a lot to hold in their heads in terms of knowledge of texts when they go into their exam, so if sentence openers become familiar and embedded as part of their writing routine, it helps reduce some of the cognitive load and gives students who find writing difficult a useful starting point.

03/08/2026

A recent outcome from a football-mad child in Y3! He has very little interest in reading and writing so I've been trying to find routes in to engage him! We've been working on adverbials, developing vocabulary, end-stop punctuation and capital letters for the names of places. 😊

02/08/2026

A recent writing outcome from one of my Y5 pupils who is absolutely obessessed with dragons! We used the teaching sequence Impossible Creatures from The Teaching Bookshelf as inspiration.
We've had a spelling focus on the ous suffix. And we've worked on varying sentence openers with a range of nouns and pronouns, beginning sentences with subordinating conjunctions, varying end stop punctuation and an introduction to colons.
We're going to be presenting her final outcome as a Waterfall book.
Her progress has been phenomenal. 😊