The theme of this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week is Express Yourself.
Expressing yourself is about finding ways to share feelings, thoughts, or ideas, through creativity, through art, music, writing and poetry, dance and drama, photography and film.
Free resources for children and young people are available to explore what it means to Express Yourself and can be easily adapted for use in school, for home-schooling, online lessons or independent learning.
From Grandad’s Island by Benji Davies
Click here for video resources for 11 author/illustrators, freely available on the CLPE YouTube channel and enjoy listening to 11 picture books read aloud by the authors/illustrators.
An amazing resource perfect for lockdown for parents and children to listen to.
Enjoy!
Benji Davies shows how to draw grandad from Grandad’s Island.
Also you will find some fantastic illustrators here showing how they create their characters, brilliant to draw along to.
The Power of Pictures helps primary school teachers to develop their understanding of the craft of picture book creation and illustration as a way of raising children’s reading and writing. Enjoy using the specially developed free teaching resources for all age groups.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) have announced a free School Talks programme where a number of their Fellows will be delivering free online talks to schools throughout Scotland.
All talks are presented by inspirational experts, keen to enthuse and excite young people in P6 – S6 covering Sciences; Technologies; Social Studies; Health and Wellbeing; Expressive Arts; Mathematics; and Languages. They look AMAZING! Many of the speakers are also willing to work with teachers to tailor their talks to fit with class curriculums.
For more information about the talks and how to book please visit https://www.rse.org.uk/schools/school-talks/
A colourful free e-Book helping to talk through feelings around covid 19 with young children. Available from Oxford University Press here
Winnie and Wilbur Stay at Home from the popular series by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul is available as an e-Book with fun activities and can be downloaded free here
Great news! Mantra Lingua is a UK based publisher of award winning multilingual education resources and is offering free access to ebooks for home reading. Their ebooks come in 37 languages and you can enjoy the books free until 31st August 2020.
Click here to sign up and start reading.
Enjoy an interview with the best selling author Dan Freedman, the writer of the FANTASTIC Jamie Johnson football novels, take a Premier League challenge and VERY IMPORTANTLY read Dan Freedman’s e-book The Kick Off here absolutely free!
The RED Book Award, now in its 14th year, was in danger of not going ahead because of the coronavirus, however it was decided to organise the ceremony on-line. Over 70 teachers and pupils gathered on Microsoft Teams on 27/5/2020 to join the 4 wonderful shortlisted authors:
Lauren James who wrote The Quiet at the End of the World
Matt Killeen who wrote Orphan Monster Spy
Gill Lewis who wrote The Closest Thing to Flying
Fiona Shaw who wrote Outwalkers
The Q & A session was excellent with the authors answering brilliant questions from the pupils. The ceremony was interrupted with some occasional ‘hand dancing’ by the librarians, teachers, guests and authors! The young people had written alternative endings to the shortlisted books and the overall winner, from Larbert HS, had written another ending to The Closest Thing to Flying, the author, Gill Lewis, said she was “blown away” by the writing.
And then it was time to open the red envelope to reveal the winning book:
The Quiet at the End of the World by Lauren James who was delighted and said it was her first regional book award win!
Congratulations Lauren.
Award-winning children’s author, Katherine Rundell, has launched The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain Children in Lockdown, which is hosted exclusively on the National Literacy Trust’s Family Zone.
Completely free for all children and families, the extraordinary collection of short stories, poems, essays and pictures has contributions from more than 110 children’s writers and illustrators.
Reading stories helps us to see things through other people’s eyes and helps us to develop empathy.
On the week of 18 May – empathy lab will be launching toolkits for schools which can be used on Empathy Day, 9 June, just email primary@empathylab.uk or secondary@empathylab.uk and write Toolkit in the subject to be sent a link for the toolkits.
Family activity packs full of ideas and downloadable resources to support home learning are available now – click here.
At this time you may wish to read stories online as one of the many ways to digitally engage children and young people. Many publishers understand this, and have temporarily lifted or adjusted their copyright guidelines and permissions, please visit this website to find out which publishers have adjusted their policies. You will also find guidelines to follow from each participating publisher.
Don’t forget that many others are offering free resources and tools on their websites.
