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Home4Schools – A homepage that gives you a positive start of the day [#BettFuturesTakeover]

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Teaching is a tough job. Finding enough hours in the day to be on top of our workload is a magic trick few of us have mastered. That’s why we’ve created home4schools.com, to give you at least one period a day that’s always planned for you.

Workload and wellbeing are big topics in education at the moment for a reason. With so much to do in a day, a positive start to each morning can make a huge difference; that’s why we give you everything you need to make form time meaningful and stress-free.

To make our site useful for everyone, we’ve made it a homepage created specifically for schools.

We put our heads together, and designed what we’d like our ideal homepage to look like; a word of the day, the news headlines from BBC news to boost awareness of current events, and a fun fact to develop a bit of general knowledge. The homepage is totally free to use, and provides a learning opportunity every time a student opens a web browser.

Whether you want to subscribe to the form time activities or not, we hope you’ll agree that our homepage is better for students than google alone, or even your school website.

Our subscription ‘hubs’ are designed so that activities can pretty much run themselves. There’s always a choice of two or three different activities, so there’s always something suitable for your group, and they come with a free printable workbook, so you won’t even need to worry about printing more than once per half term. It also means you’ll have evidence of your provision for form time.  

You’ll be able to do all the daily pastoral jobs, like taking the register, checking for notices, monitoring reports and uniform, and even actually getting time to chat to your students, because the activities are taken care of.

If you’re organised enough to be on top of all these tasks already, you could lead the group in a discussion about the weekly debate topic on the literacy hub, or challenge them to beat you at the countdown-style numbers game on the numeracy hub. The activities are flexible enough to incorporate any teaching style, and they’re all planned for you.

We’ve started with Literacy and Numeracy hubs. Emily is a maths teacher and ex-HoD, so the problem-solving skills that are becoming even more vital in the new maths GCSE are incorporated into the numeracy hub. We’ve also consulted with an AQA examiner for GCSE English to make sure that the literacy activities are building the right skills to help prepare students for their exams.

We are currently developing resources ready for the SMSC & British Values hub.

Home4Schools is run by Paul and Emily Hughes – a husband and wife team from Peterborough, with 30 years teaching experience between them. With Paul as the Head of Computing at his school, he knew just the person to do the web design – an ex-student, Ryan O’Connor, who now runs his own web development business. Discuss further with Paul and Emily at Bett 2018, stand P5.

For more information, visit Home4Schools’ website.

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