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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

National curriculum drama: the lowdown

Character from a play
Most children are natural actors and drama helps to unleash their creativity and build up their confidence. Find out what your child will be learning in class and how you can develop their flair for the theatrical at home.

National curriculum drama is one of the 12 strands of learning in the literacy curriculum. It helps children think about the 'who, why, where, and when' elements of stories, events and everyday experiences. Drama helps children develop a creative perspective on life and gives them freedom of expression.

What happens in class?

In national curriculum drama lessons most children learn to:

  • use dramatic techniques, including working in role to explore ideas and texts
  • create, share and evaluate ideas through drama

Opportunities to learn drama techniques will also be presented to pupils in other strands in the literacy curriculum. In ‘Speaking and Listening’, for example, children are expected to learn to ‘speak competently and creatively for different purposes and audiences', which can be tried out in the lines spoken by different characters in a play.

Alongside the literacy aspect, drama helps develop a child's confidence, self-esteem and communication skills across the national curriculum. Classes provide a safe environment in which children can express themselves using improvising and spontaneity exercises.

Cross-curricular drama

Drama lends itself well to cross curricular possibilities. It can be used to help children learn history (through re-enactments of events) geography (through imagining the landscape) and PSHE (through creating scenarios and situations to explore issues, such as bullying).

It can also be used to help children making the transition to big school, junior school or secondary. Again, through drama games, role play and improvisation pupils can express their fears, worries and anxieties.

Get ahead in drama at home

Try these tricks to help your child improve their confidence and enjoy drama at home:

  • Provide a dressing-up box for your child and their friends to play with. It will inspire all sorts of different role play
  • Encourage your child to tell you stories and act them out to you
  • Ask your child and their friends to perform a play for you and the other parents. It will keep them busy for hours and will be very entertaining
  • If your child is particularly interested in drama, take them to extra-curricular drama lessons in their free time