Guided Reading Books from Bloomsbury

Posted on December 16, 2021 by ofamily

I have not written posts on guided reading books for quite a while because my youngest is really past that stage. He is a happy reader who powers through books at quite an impressive speed (as long as they are interesting). But when I heard that Bloomsbury publishing have put together a guided reading scheme and when I had a look to see what sort of books that had included I was actually intrigued. I do remember struggling to find interesting reading books for my kids when they were younger, books that were well-written, engaging and not too scary so I thought “for the me who struggled” I would investigate the series in a bit more detail and see if this reading scheme would have been something I could have used.

They have broken down the reading books into year stages which are represented as coloured bands

Click to access bloomsbury-readers-chart-2021_spreads.pdf

I decided to focus on the last three bands (the older years – more the early chapter type books). We tested out 3 books. First impression – these are interesting, engaging stories with well-developed characters (I really liked that the characters are well written). My son actually picked up the Band Red book (Rubi Ali’s Mission Break up) and read the whole thing. He thought it was interesting and amusing in places (a little bit of fun goes a long way in terms of his reading enjoyment).

I read the Dark Blue Band (The Night the Moon went out) and the whole way through reading it I kept thinking this would have been the prefect book for my daughter. She loved these gentle stories that involved animals. She probably would have read this a few times and I am guessing she would even written her own version of this story. It really would have been a BIG HIT with her.

Oh and the Grey Book (Sindhu and Jeet’s Detective Agency) – we loved this idea.

I know these are written as guided readers but I must admit I was impressed with the descriptive language used. At the moment this a big point for us – I am constantly trying to find examples of good descriptive language as examples for my kids to read so they can incorporate elements into their own creative writing. These books definitely ticked that box.

All of that said the thing that takes this reading series up a level is the fact that they have created Teacher’s Notes for most of these readers (which are all FREE to download from their website). As a home educator, finding good quality, engaging resources linked to enjoyable books is, well – Home educator GOLD.

I downloaded and read through the Teacher’s Notes for The Night The Moon Went Out. The whole set was 14 pages and it consisted of ideas and questions which you could talk to your kids about. Think of it as a springboard. I liked the fact that the questions / activities for each chapter focused on something specific like – Noting Text Structure or Empathising and Summarising. Fourteen pages might not sound like a lot but for primary aged kids I thought it was actually the right length and the right type of questions.

I think this is an interesting set of readers with good quality Teacher’s notes. If you are home educating younger kids I would recommend having a look at this series.

You can purchases these books directly from Bloomsbury – Sindhu and Jeet’s Detective Agency, The Night the Moon Went Out and Ruby Ali’s Mission Break Up.

Or from amazon Sindhu and Jeet’s Detective Agency: A Bloomsbury Reader (Bloomsbury Readers),

The Night the Moon Went Out: A Bloomsbury Reader (Bloomsbury Readers),

Ruby Ali’s Mission Break Up: A Bloomsbury Reader (Bloomsbury Readers)

Admin – I did receive Press copies of these three books. I was NOT paid for this post.

I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

KS3 Geography Crosswords

Posted on December 15, 2021 by ofamily

My daughter has always enjoyed crosswords and when she was younger we often completed crosswords linked to the topics that we were learning in Geography or History so I was excited to spot the KS3 Geography Crosswords created by Oaka Books.

The Crossword Booklets have been written as revision tools. So the idea would be the kids would only complete the Plate Tectonics crossword once they had finished learning about Plate Tectonics. (There is one double page crossword for each topic). The questions focus on key definitions and important features of each topic (so in a way it is actually a great summary of important facts). And they have included the answers at the back of each booklet (which is very useful as I will admit there were a couple of questions that I was not sure what the answer was).

Both Crossword booklets (Level 1 and Level 2) cover the exact same topics.

  • Plate Tectonics
  • Weather and Climate
  • River Processes
  • Population and Settlement
  • Transport and Industry
  • Environmental Issues
  • Map Reading

The difference is in the layout and the questions asked. The Level 1 Crossword booklet is considered the easier version and it includes some picture clues with each question. Each crossword has 30 questions – so that is 30 revision questions for each topic (or as I like to think of it 30 key points per topic).

Having said that it is the “easier” version does not mean it is that easy. When my daughter worked on the River Crossword she filled in the answers to the questions she knew and then she did still had to go and look up a few answers in order to complete her crossword.

The Level 2 Crossword booklet does have slightly different questions and there are no visual clues to help with the answers. Also there are more questions per topic in the Level 2 booklet (there tends to be around 37 to 40 questions for each topic).

For our own personal use Level 1 suits us. It is just the right amount of questions at the right level to make revision engaging, interesting and VERY effective. If my daughter does decide to do Geography as a GCSE (or IGCSE) subject then we may use the Level 2 as a revision resource but for now Level 1 ticks all our needs. The only downside is now I keep wishing I could find more KS3 Crosswords like this for our other subjects.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Free Download – WW1 Significant Dates Poster and Cards

Posted on December 8, 2021 by ofamily

Our History theme has been the First World War and one of the things that has bugged us a bit was how hard it was to find a good, brief summary of the key dates (free to download summary) so we ended up creating our own.

Our first version was a handwritten poster.

But we decided that it was actually really useful so we typed it up – nothing fancy just the dates and significant events in the order that they occurred. And we created a colourful version and a printer friendly version (i.e. less colourful for those days when your ink is running low).

Here are the Free downloads, please download for your own use.

world-war-1-timelineDownload
world-war-1-timeline-colourful-2Download

And then because we like using sorting cards as a way of remembering facts we also created a set of significant event cards. With this set we did not include the dates, just a brief description of what happened. I felt that including the dates would have made it too easy as I wanted the kids sort the events without hints.

Here is the file

first-world-war-timeline-cards-2Download

I have included the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as the trigger event for World War One but I have not included cards which mention the slow build up (eg Franco-Prussian war, arms race etc).

I have also not included when some of the smaller countries joined, I have just focused on the main countries. It is just a case of me trying to summarize events and not make it too long and detailed.

I hope some of you find our summaries useful. But please do NOT repost these documents on your site and claim them as your own. They were created by us for users to download directly from the ofamily learning together site.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Private Peaceful. World War One Literature.

Posted on December 6, 2021 by ofamily

The kids and I have recently finished reading Private Peaceful. What a brilliant book and it was an excellent way to integrate our History (World War One topic) and our English Literature.

But I have to warn anyone who has never read this book before it is sad. I was reading it with both of my kids and in the last two chapters I was reading through tears. That being said it is a brilliant book to read with your kids while you are working on the First World War. You get to experience what it would have been like being a young man in the First World War, from being guilted into joining, to training and then to life in the trenches and having to go over the top. You get to understand shell shock and you get to feel how shocking the policy of shooting young soldiers accused of cowardice was. But that is not all this book covers (although that would have been enough), this is one of Michael Morpurgo’s best works (we have read a lot of his books), the way he draws you into his characters lives and the way he builds up the relationship between the two brothers is incredible.

There is something about reading books that are well-written, the kids remember the moving descriptions, they remember how the author develops his characters and shows their weaknesses as well as their strengths to get a well-rounded person. And if they read enough of these powerful books, they do end up including some of the ideas in their own creative writing. This book is truly one of those that just stays with you.

We (all three of us) highly recommend reading Private Peaceful if you are studying World War One (we would say it is suitable for ages 10ish and over) and honestly even if you are not studying World War One it is a powerful, moving story that is worth reading.

Since we were reading Private Peaceful as one of our English Literature books I wanted to find some activities to work through with the kids. I found a really good selection of of activities on the Twinkl website (under their vast KS3 English Literature section). And I must confess because I had not read the book before I really found the Knowledge Organiser for Private Peaceful incredibly useful. I printed it out and read it before we started and it just helped to give me an idea of where we were going and what was going to be covered.

They have chapter by chapter worksheets which is a great way to wrap up a chapter after you have read it. We used these after every chapter – with this book we really did read a chapter a day and then the kids worked through the chapter questions, they are only one page long so they are not that long.

And they also have these useful character worksheets – I like the way they set these out, the questions they asked are good examples of things to think about if you were planning on writing a few paragraphs discussing a character.

They had a number of other interesting pages but I must admit after working through the chapter questions, and character studies the only other thing I printed out was the homework booklet. We really loved the whole idea of this booklet and I just printed it out and gave it my oldest and asked her to work through it and give it to me at the end of the week.

The Private Peaceful worksheets are one of a number of English Literature resources from the Twinkl Beyond section that I have used and been impressed. If you are looking for possible KS3 English Literature resources I suggest having a look around the KS3 and GCSE resources on the Twinkl website (We have actually used a few of the GCSE English Literature resources in our KS3 work so it is worth looking under both sections).

admin – I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

KS3 English Anthology – Detectives

Posted on November 30, 2021 by ofamily

Our latest KS3 English Anthology that we have started using is the Detective one. My kids are I are really enjoying the books in the series so when I wanted to get an extra English book it just made sense to stick with the series we are loving and get another one.

But the one thing I have noticed is that some books are slightly easier and some are more challenging and I must admit when I started using this series I just went with the topic that I wanted and did not pay that much attention to which book was recommended for which year. The first book we used was the Myths and Legends book and I felt like I could use it with both my kids (at the time my son would have been year 5 and my daughter Year 8). I felt like he could join in with some of the easier questions (mainly the look closer questions) and she did all the questions. Then we got the War Anthology and it was a definite step up in terms of harder questions. I felt like it was a brilliant book for my daughter (I liked that it was a bit more challenging and we loved that it linked in with our History) but I did feel like it was a bit too much of a stretch for my youngest.

Hodder Education do state on their website that the skills are built up as you work through the series and that the books do increase in difficulty. And they do actually have a Anthologies at a glance breakdown where they show you which Anthologies they would recommend for each year (Myths and Legends was for Year 7 and War was for Year 8 and comparing the two we have used, there is a definite increase in the degree of difficulty of questions.)

For our new Anthology book I wanted something that would work with my youngest. He really enjoyed the Myths and Legends activities that he did and that is unusual for him, he normally just grits his teeth and completes his English activities as quickly as he can. So I was tempted to get another Anthology just to use with him even if it was too easy for my oldest. But I have also been spending quite a bit of time thinking about English Literature for my oldest and making sure we cover all angles. My daughter reads a LOT (and I really do mean a LOT) but she actually does not read Detective books, she likes 19th Century stories and War stories, so I started thinking it might actually be good for her to work through a few detective pages just to get the feeling for the detective genre (and who knows she might even be inspired to read one of the books covered in the Detective book). So our third Anthology is the Detective one (I am still thinking of getting the 19th Century and Gothic one – and just doing a few activities out of those with my oldest as I know they will be good for her to try).

At a first glance I do agree with the suggested years. The Detective Anthology is definitely more along the lines of the Myths and Legends in terms of degree of difficulty of the questions. Also they have included lots of works that are familiar – Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew and Poirot which is always great (my kids love it when they have heard of something or someone before) and they have included a number of works that I would like my kids (well hope) to eventually read.

The format is the same as the other books in the series (although I have been told the Shakespeare Anthology format is different). It is split into three sections – Fiction, Non Fiction and Poetry. And under each of those sections there are eight different extracts that are covered. And for each extract covered you get a wide range of questions (this wide range of questions is one of the reasons we enjoy these books as much as we do. It keeps it interesting and it keeps the kids engaged.)

The questions are split into three broad categories

Look Closer – this tend to be the “slightly easier questions”, shorter answers and tend to be more comprehension type questions.

Now Try This – these are the longer questions. They include lots of different writing activities – create an advert, write a letter, write a newspaper article, diary entry all kinds of writing activities. I really like these longer writing activities.

Practice Questions – these range from fairly short pick the correct statement to longer write three paragraphs type questions.

There are no answers in the book but if you log onto the Hodder Education website you can download all the sample answers for all of the English Anthology books for FREE (I really appreciate that they have added this to the site).

We have only just started using this Anthology but I already like it. I like that I can use it with my youngest to extend his Year 6 English activities and I like that I can use it as a way of going over the detective writing genre with my oldest. I also really like the varied questions, they are interesting and engaging and honestly this is one of the most enjoyable English series that we have found.

My oldest has always enjoyed English but my youngest is not that keen on working on English activities however he does enjoy the activities that I chose from the Anthology series. And really after 9 years of home educating if you can get the kids interested, engaged and even enjoying their work they really do take it in, learn more, remember more and as a home educator that just makes my life a LOT easier.

We have received all of our English Anthology books from Hodder – here are the links to the books on their website. (A quick note – on the Hodder website they also have Boost eBooks which are the digital version of these books, it is exactly the same content but instead of getting a paper book you get online access for a year.)

Detective Anthology

Myths and Legends Anthology

War Anthology

You can also buy them directly from Amazon

Key Stage 3 English Anthology: Detectives

Key Stage 3 English Anthology: Myths and Legends

Key Stage 3 English Anthology: War

Admin – Hodder Education kindly sent us a copy of the Detective Anthology book after I asked if we could review it. I have not been paid for this post and all opinions / words written are mine.

I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.

Posted in Homeschooling | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments