General

Is you brain scrambled trying to hatch ideas to keep your pupils reading over the Easter break? Look no further than these cracking challenges to involve families, eggcite children and encourage them to peck up a book over the school holiday.

Download these challenges and accompanying activity sheets for FREE! Print them off and pop them into book bags or email home. 

The invasion of Ukraine commenced in February 2022, and regrettably, it appears that this conflict is far from reaching a resolution anytime soon. The UK has welcomed almost 200,000 Ukrainian nationals^[1] so far and had offered school places to 20,500 children by the end of September 2022^[2]. Many of these children arrived with limited English and teachers and support staff were understandably looking for appropriate resources to ease their transition into school.

Here, at Badger Learning, we decided to publish a range of six dual language English–Ukrainian eBook PDFs and a simple phrasebook in June 2022 and to offer these for free. We have been taken aback by the response from schools and families with over 13,000 copies downloaded so far from all over the world including in Ukraine. Many of you contacted us to request more resources so we conducted a survey to find out what would be most useful and had an unprecedented number of responses. Of these, 74% requested printed books as well as eBooks, 99% were interested in more fiction titles and 91% more non-fiction. Of the fiction themes, Humour, Action & Adventure were the most widely requested with recurring characters and fantasy elements as the most popular choices.<!

This year we are excited to launch our very own Badger Book Awards, designed to encourage reading for pleasure and champion incredible books. We’ve shortlisted fifty titles from 2022, splitting them into the top 10 titles for Years 7 to 11. 

Each vote submitted gives you a chance to win £500 worth of books for your secondary school! The author of each winning category will also be given £500 worth of books to donate to a UK school of their choice.

VOTING ENDS SOON! 3Oth June 2023

“Over the last two decades, there has been a deepening recognition of the fundamental importance of improving reading standards on a child’s future academic achievement, wellbeing and success in life.” (The Reading Framework DfE, 2022)

Recent government guidance highlights the importance of children ‘keeping-up’ with reading progression, rather than having to ‘catch-up’. Schools must follow a Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme (SSP) to ensure robust plans are in place to help children quickly master the foundations of phonics and then build upon these basic mechanics of reading towards fluency.

“Yet despite our best efforts, too many children fall behind in literacy…and the gap in literacy attainment grows substantially during Key Stage 2.”

(Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 EEF, November 2021)

In fact, in 2019 (the

As families across the UK welcome Ukrainian refugees into their homes in response to the unfolding humanitarian crisis, primary and secondary schools are now enrolling pupils from Ukraine into all year groups. Teachers will be looking for appropriate dual language books and resources to support children in learning English and integrating into school life in the UK.

We at Badger Learning have been thinking about what we can do to support children arriving from Ukraine and have decided to translate and publish a range of six dual language English–Ukrainian eBook PDFs for schools and families. We have consulted with our authors and commissioned professional translators to work on these books so we can offer them to schools and families to download free of charge. These are suitable for children in KS2 and KS3 (ages 8–14) and are ideal learning resources to support children in building fluency in reading in English. 

Mental health and wellbeing go hand-in-hand and are not only central to promoting effective learning and future successful, independent living, they are ESSENTIAL for helping children and young people develop and thrive.

Focusing on improving a child’s mental health and wellbeing will help them to cope with key life events such as stress, trauma and physical ill-health. Not only are children with better mental wellbeing more likely to be engaged in lessons, better behaved and make more progress but they are also more likely to deal better with stressful events and recover more quickly from illness.

Posters can brighten up any library space as they capture the attention and enable discussion, which in turn encourages students to visit. When used as part of a wider library or classroom display, posters have the power not only to promote specific books but to introduce students to new subjects and concepts, encouraging them to think deeply, investigate widely and broaden their horizons.

Posters are perfect for all your students but especially reluctant and struggling readers. They are visually engaging with clear and concise information so the material can be absorbed quickly, even at a glance. Whether it be a quote, a scientific principle or a profile of a popstar, posters can motivate and focus students in a way that other learning aids may not.

When 65% of people worldwide find visual learning more effective it is crucial to use images and graphics to impart information within schools. Posters are one of the best (and easiest) ways to effectively achieve this in a

This year, the Department for Education has brought in some changes that will impact the teaching of phonics in many schools, as well as the phonic books and resources that will be needed to support it. Our reading scheme specialists have put together some FAQs to help schools ensure their teaching programme is up-to-date with current Ofsted guidance and has the right reading books and resources in place.

Context

The 2007 Letters and Sounds Framework set out to provide schools with a basis for teaching systematic synthetic phonics (SSP). Although this has never been statutory, over 50% of schools use this as the basis of their phonics teaching and it was included on the list of approved phonics programmes on gov.uk. However, it is not, and has never been a full programme setting out in detail how phonics will be taught on a week-by-week basis. It relied upon schools building their own programme of resources around the handbook and in many cases updating the progression

A study conducted by Renaissance Learning in 2020 showed that 63% of teachers expected that lockdown — and all the limitations that come with it — would increase the existing attainment gap for disadvantaged students. Perhaps more alarmingly, over a third of teachers indicated that they did not feel their school was prepared to measure, and subsequently act on, those attainment differences upon returning to the classroom.

Filling gaps will no doubt be an ongoing priority for teachers as we navigate a post-lockdown landscape, with key areas of learning taking priority in the mission to catch up. Few areas are more key than literacy, and we know it is going to be a race against time to try and accelerate some students back up to the level of their peers, to reinforce the key skills that will enable them to access the rest of the curriculum. To that end, we wanted to highlight some of our best ‘reading for pleasure’ resources to provide as clear a path as possible — particularly at the al

As we enter a new year, we once again find ourselves taking on the role of home educators, many of us with only the experience of the previous lockdown to use as a reference point. We all want to do the best for our children. We want to look after their mental health while simultaneously providing the best possible education for them — all within in a climate for which we have never been trained. But we did it in the spring, and we can do it again. You’ll be feeling tired. Possibly daunted. We all are. But this blog is here to remind you of the tools that already exist within you and at your fingertips.

There are a huge number of digital resources out there, and once again, schools will be sharing links with families on what systems they are using to keep children learning their school subjects. While we can rely on the proficiency of our amazing teachers to signpost these resources and direct us in teaching opportunities, there is also a hugely important additional way we can sup