Livello Year 3 Module 5

An interesting take on the classic Romeo and Juliet story, or West Side Story theme. Two young cats fall in love but their families hate each other. How will they bring their families together? Includes some intriguing place value activities based on coloured rats and reasons to look at an issue from someone else’s point of view.

Possible Topic Links

Parks and playing, healthy living, mini-beasts, food chains, local environment

Maths content includes

Place value in the context of rats, comparing length, fractions, 4 x table in the context of cats’ paws

English content includes

Identifying main ideas, using prepositions, organising paragraphs, poetry, rich vocabulary

Reviews

Pewsey Primary School

About the school

Pewsey Primary School is one of the largest Primary Schools in the Vale of Pewsey, which allows them to provide an extremely diverse environment that offers a wide social circle, encouraging good relationship skills and excellent teamwork. The school prides itself on recognising pupils as individuals and believes that they can become confident, independent-thinking learners if given the best possible chance to reach their full potential.  

Nicola Gilbert, headteacher

We revitalised our curriculum to make it skills based two years ago so our work is now very focused on topics and we have a huge emphasis on improving writing. This year, we also needed to focus on reading and we wanted to make sure that the new maths and English curriculum were covered but not tie ourselves into something that would do all the work and leave little room for creativity, so the Livello modules were perfect for us. We decided to get at least one Livello module for each year group. 

We loved the fact that these were taught through a book and that they can be used so well across other subjects. We began by using Scarab Secrets with a Key Stage 2 class when we were covering Egypt and it went down brilliantly; the children were really enthused, they went home and talked to their parents about it, which is always nice to hear! We also had our year two class using the Tin Forest and they’ve done some beautiful artwork as well as improving basic reading skills and looking at topics like inference and deduction. For us it’s all about teaching the fundamental skills then developing the higher order skills and these modules really help us with this. That it also sparks their imagination is great, in fact, the teachers were amazed at how useful they were! They thought they were picture books that would take about a week to work through but instead they took them through the whole topic and saved loads of planning time.

We’ve planned our curriculum for the next two years and, as we’re an academy, we have the freedom to choose so we’ve been able to add the books that the Livello modules are based on to our reading list. The key thing for us is meeting the needs of the children and the modules allow us to be very creative in using them across different age groups and different subjects. Our standards have definitely risen due to all our work across the school and Livello played an important part in this.

Preshute Primary School

About the school

Preshute Primary School is a village school in Manton, near Marlborough in the North East of Wiltshire. The school believes that children who understand and appreciate people from different backgrounds and feel part of a community become better citizens so it focuses on a caring ethos and developing a love of life and learning for its pupils.

Celia Hicks, headteacher

We knew Marie and Liz from the days of their work with the local authority and experience tells us that anything they do they do well! They really care about the quality of what they’re providing. When they started creating thematic planning resources it was like a dream come true for us. We wanted to develop a love of reading amongst our pupils and we knew that the Livello resources would save us hours and hours of planning but without spoon-feeding us.

We tested it out by doing some dry runs then we adapted it to our needs. Years 1 and 2 are using the same modules and the creativity and ingenuity of the ideas is phenomenal – particularly for maths. If a teacher wants to take it at face value, they can but we like to personalise it to make it our own. All topics are cross-referenced so you can be confident that you’ve covered everything and we tailor it to feed other subjects in, which makes cross-curricular topic planning a breeze.

The children love it. They love the text and I think it’s rather good for getting the older children get to see the quality of the language in the text. It also helps us keep up with what’s available in terms of children’s literature.

I had the training and I think it’s a good idea to dip in and see but you don’t need to go to them all. It just brings a smile to my face when i go into a classroom and see non-flammable tea lights all over the floor and the children sitting on a magic carpet, using their imaginations to travel somewhere. You just wish Ofsted could walk in at that moment!