Tony Poulter has created a wonderful resource called the Primary Teacher’s Toolbox. According to Tony, it has ‘more useful links than you can shake a stick at’.

www.btinternet.com/~tony.poulter

There are links to:

• useful sites for teachers,
• child-safe websites suitable for foundation, KS1 and KS2 children,
• cyberhunts which encourage children to use the Internet,
• interactive quizzes and more…

Tony has also added useful information and documents for teachers and trainees. The site is well worth exploring.

The new primary curriculum, which becomes statutory from September 2011, is now online. Its aims are to enable all young people to become:

• successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve,
• confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives,
• responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.

http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/new-primary-curriculum/

Through the curriculum, children should develop the skills, attitudes and dispositions that they need to become well-rounded individuals and lifelong learners. These include literacy, numeracy and ICT capability, learning and thinking skills, and personal, social and emotional skills. There are also six areas of learning:

• Understanding the arts
• Understanding English, communication and languages
• Historical, geographical and social understanding
• Mathematical understanding
• Understanding physical development, health and wellbeing
• Scientific and technological understanding

Religious education is also a statutory subject, as it is in the current curriculum. However, there will also be a statutory requirement for all children to learn a modern foreign language. Dance, drama and citizenship also become part of the statutory curriculum through the new areas of learning.

Find out more at the New Primary Curriculum site.

Tony Crowley has created a number of career education publications which can be used by primary schools and younger secondary school pupils. They are freely downloadable and aim to support the government’s plans to bring certain aspects of careers education into primary schools.

The resources contain games, group activities, quizzes, questionnaires and worksheets. One of these documents is embedded below and the others can be downloaded here.

A conference, aimed at helping to ease the transition between primary and secondary schools has been organised for 25th February in Manchester. The event aims to give practical ideas of how to ease transition, disseminate findings from a three year project and help staff to share experiences.

More details can be found in the PDF embedded below.

For further information, visit www.dep.org.uk.

Succeeding with Science is an extremely useful site for primary and secondary Science teachers with lots of free downloadable resources and online magazines.

www.succeedingwithscience.com

The latest edition of the primary magazine, For Teachers By Teachers, is a twice yearly, free online magazine which encourages and supports science teaching in the primary classroom. Building on our previous online resource, Once Upon a Time in Cumbria, the current edition focuses on a local research project that helps Year 6 pupils to identify the events and innovations that can cause communities to change.

Along with a PowerPoint Presentation describing how Cumbria has changed over time, FTBT provides comprehensive notes and lesson plans enabling teachers to undertake projects about their own local area with their classes.

Hi everyone,

I’m Mark Warner… I’m a primary teacher and I’ve been running a number of websites to support teachers for many years. I was very sad to read Andrew’s recent post about the end of this blog, as I’ve always found the site to be an extremely useful source of education news and information.

Andrew has kindly allowed me to take over the running of Primary Teacher UK, which I’m very excited about. The site has obviously been a huge amount of work for him, and I’m keen to ensure that all of the information that he (and his guest contributors) have previously posted stays online. I’m also looking forward to posting more news, links and information.

I recently started another blog for teachers, over at www.teachingblog.co.uk, where I’ve been posting teaching news and links to some great educational sites. I’m thinking about merging these two blogs at some point, so that all of the content is in one place. However, I probably won’t be able to organise this for a while as I’m getting married next week!

I hope you’re as pleased as I am that Primary Teacher UK will be continuing… and I hope I do as good a job as Andrew did.

Have a fantastic summer… I’ll post another message soon.

Primary Teacher UK, created by Andrew Ross with contributions from others, is a fantastic blog for anyone interested in teaching in the UK.

Andrew posts lots of useful information and advice for teachers, the latest education news, and links to recommended sites. Subscribe to the RSS feed to receive regular updates.