Embedding Key Skills with Purple Mash

It’s that time of year when children in all year groups will be practising and revising their key skills, ready for SATs, the Multiplication Tables Check or end of year assessments.  We’ve got lots of resources on Purple Mash and Serial Mash to help with the key skills across reading, writing, SPaG and maths.

Reading

Within Purple Mash, there are masses of resources to practise key reading skills:

DK Learning Content Pieces

Develop your students' non-fiction comprehension using our range of DK Learning content pieces. They cover a wide range of topics, have engaging pictures and every single one has complementary reading comprehension resources.

Resources on Popular Texts

We know there are a number of books which are incredibly popular in schools, so we've created resources to run alongside these. Some of the popular texts have quizzes for each chapter, which are great for whole-class or group comprehension sessions. They can even be set as 2Dos for a piece of homework.

Book Analysis Resources

If your class need to practise their analysis and comparison skills, why not try some of the below resources with a book of your choice? Children can even create their own quiz about the book they're reading!

Serial Mash

Serial Mash can be added on to Purple Mash and has over 200 eBooks with corresponding comprehension resources and activities, which are great for practising for the Reading and SPaG portions of the SATs.

The Serial Mash library also contains full DK Learning books and online reading journals for children to record their reading. The Fire Bolt series is included specifically to give less confident readers a chance to read for pleasure.

Every week you'll get the latest chapter of a specially-written serialised book. Read on tablets, on laptops, with print out copies, or together via an interactive whiteboard, highlighting important words as you read.

Writing

If your class need to brush up their writing, try some of our interactive activities to develop their use of vocabulary and sentences. Use sentence pairs to rearrange and explore sentence structures, or word combos to build up increasingly complex sentences. We also have a whole array of activities for word level work.

Need some inspiration for creative writing? Take a look at our videos for creative writing: The Mysterious Egg is aimed at ages 5-7, and Mystery of the Dakota Diamonds and The Trouble with Tamarins are aimed at ages 7-9, while Catching Blueprints is aimed at 9-11 year olds. Each mystery comes in five parts, with each part there is a writing activity as well as some computing activities.

SPaG

Did you know we have a whole spelling scheme of work on Purple Mash? It includes slides, quizzes, dictation activities and Look, Cover, Write, Check worksheets - all perfect for practising or revisiting particularly tricky spellings. You can even make your own spelling quiz!

There are also lots of grammar and punctuation games for all levels. Practise capital letters, full stops, exclamation marks and question marks or play games to better understand word types.

Maths

Any Year 4 teachers will be busy revising times tables with their class, ready for the Multiplication Tables Check (MTC) which is to be administered from 5th-12th June 2023.

Alongside our fun Monster Multiplication game, we also have Multiplication Check, which has been designed to mirror, as closely as possible, the format of the MTC by the Standards & Testing Agency. Assessment mode gives children 25 questions with 6 seconds per question, and a 3 second pause between each question.

Our Multiplication Check tool also includes Custom Mode, allowing you to select tables to be assessed, number of questions, time per question and much more.

Our other maths games are perfect for an extra bit of practice on key skills:

• 2Race - Multiplayer racing games, choose from addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, one less one more, number bonds, comparing numbers or odd and even numbers.
• Bond Bubbles - Pop the bubbles by firing the correct number facts, choose from Dino World (Make 5 to Make 20), Myth Valley (Make tens numbers), or Robot City (Make hundreds numbers)
• Dividers - Shoot down the attacking numbers using your knowledge of division facts, choose from different times tables and target numbers.
• Factoroids - Use your knowledge of factors to split the number spaceships into harmless debris.
• Fraction Wall - Move the fraction blocks to complete the layers into whole ones.
• Funky Platform - Time your jumps across the platforms to match the target number.
• Sequence Snake - Direct the snake to the next number in the sequence to grow the snake.
• A-Fish-Metic - Create the correct number of fish in the sea to match the target.
• Fractonio's Pizzeria - Serve the customers with the correct fraction of toppings on each pizza.

There are also printable worksheets for a number of maths topics that you can use within class. These include number bond sheets, times table sheets and memory games, and fraction walls and fraction games.

Little Brother Books

Have you seen our partnership with Little Brother Books, Nickelodeon and Purple Mash? Our first range of educational workbooks feature characters from some of Nickelodeon's most popular shows including Baby Shark, Loud House and SpongeBob Squarepants. These education workbooks cover ages 3-11 and focus on Maths and English and are perfect for children to develop key skills whilst making learning fun with hugely well-known characters they love! The titles can be purchased at www.littlebrotherbooks.co.uk

Teacher Shared Resources

Don't forget that you can search for resources created by other Purple Mash teachers! Just go to our Resource Sharing area and use the search bar, and a whole array of fantastic resources will appear! You can then save these or set them as a 2Do. Here are a few examples which can be used to consolidate key skills:

• Irregular Past Tense (by Mary Richardson)
• Semi-colons (by Miss Mitchell)
• 4 Times Table Quiz (by Mrs K Wade)
• Multiply using the Grid Method (by Saima Kaazi)

We wish you and your students good luck in all the upcoming assessments!