Happy Dais Tutoring

Year 3 created pop-up books about Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, using the facts they learned in history to bring the story to life. 📚✨

This was a cross-curricular project combining history, writing and DT, as pupils planned and constructed moving pop-up mechanisms while carefully recording key facts and explanations in their own words.

Our version of Subtraction Snakes & Ladders game to give children a practical and engaging way to rehearse subtraction facts. 🎲➖🐍

Each square includes a number sentence, encouraging pupils to think quickly and apply their knowledge before moving on. This approach supports fluency, builds confidence and makes mathematical reasoning feel purposeful and enjoyable.

Hands-on activities like this provide valuable opportunities for children to consolidate their learning through play.

🐸✨ Made a Jumping Frog Subtraction game to make maths more active and engaging! The children loved hopping their frog down the number line. ➖💚

After drawing the outline of the book character, the children worked in groups to collage the animals with tissue paper 🐦🦫🦔✨.

It was brilliant for fine motor skills and even better for their speaking skills — with children talking through how they made their designs and explaining their choices.

Communication and Language underpins all learning in EYFS, so getting them to describe their process supports their development 🎉

Story maps are such a great teaching tool — they help children see the structure of a story, remember key events and build confidence in retelling 🗣️.
Acting out the story map with puppets makes it even more fun — the children get to bring the story to life in their own way, seeing it, feeling it and playing it out.
I’ve loved drawing our story maps, including The Bad-Tempered Ladybird 🐞 and Jack and the Beanstalk 🌱. We display them in the classroom for our Book of the Week so the children build a really deep understanding of the story.

Some of my favourite memories from teaching — chickens wandering around Forest School and watching caterpillars grow into butterflies before we set them free. 🐔🦋
Moments like these showed just how magical hands-on learning can be.

Life cycles made meaningful!
Through crafts, drawings and discussion, children explained each stage in detail—showing just how powerful hands-on learning can be. 🌿✨
Frog and butterfly life cycles never looked so good!

Exploring numbers in lots of different ways 🔢✨

In this activity, we looked at how to represent 50 using different resources — straws (bundles of 10), numicon, dienes, and cubes on tens frames.

The photo shows 18 in the middle as the children experimented with building numbers and seeing how each representation connects.

Hands-on maths = confident mathematicians! 💛📚

Lockdown or not, learning never stopped 🌱✨
From phonics groups to maths, writing, and even PE as different types of beans 🫘—we kept Reception curious, creative, and smiling.
Jack and the Beanstalk was our focus that week, so we even turned a LEGO man in a cactus into a ‘beanstalk’ 🌵➡️🌱
The children emailed kind messages for our class ‘kindness tree’ to keep everyone’s spirits high. 💚