NEW features and content November 2018

Access the

NEW BUSY THINGSgo to

www.busythings.co.uk/lgfl-loginto activate now

NEWlook & feel

Busy Things is packed with NEW features and content, starting off with a brand new welcome screen designed to help you get the most out of Busy Things!

A dedicated teacher tools area houses your search features, resource maker and other useful tools.

REMEMBER: Teacher tools are only accessible with a teacher login.

Teachers can also customise Busy Things throughout the year with a range of seasonal and topical theme backgrounds!

A warm welcome to our NEW teacher tools area!

  • Christmas theme

  • Space theme

  • Themes button

  • Seasonal and

 topical themes avail

able

NEWcontent

Test KS2 knowledge with our NEW quizzes – 60+ available!

Have fun testing children’s knowledge with our NEW quizzes – perfect as a front of class resource or for children to independently try to beat their previous scores!

Teachers can assign quizzes too giving you great visibility of how children are progressing.Covering the majority of the KS2 maths Curriculum, quiz topics are broken down into year group to match curriculum objectives.

There are also some fun grammar quizzes testing knowledge of nouns, verbs, subjects and objects, plus a Shakespeare and Tudor clothing quiz with more topics on the way!

  • Nounds and verbs   • Shakespeare  •Tudor clothing

 • To

pics

 match

 curricu

lum objec

tives

 • Assign qu

izze

s to 

reco

rd c

lass

res

ults

 • Res

ults scree

n

  • Variety of question types

Go to Search. Select Quizzes activity type. >>

NEWcontent

NEW Maths Games for ages 5-11!

Splash Dash

Miner Birds - Addition and subtraction

The popular Miner Birds suite has been expanded to include NEW Miner Birds Addition and Subtraction with a wide variety of calculations customisable for children between the ages of 5 and 11.

As with all the Miner Birds games the aim is to be the first to collect 20 worms by correctly answering maths questions – so not only will children have fun practising their maths skills, they must also employ strategy and logical thinking to succeed!

Miner Birds can be played against the computer or in a group with up to 4 players, each player can choose individual difficulty settings.

  • Includes a weekly school leader board

  • Enter the correct answer to collect the worms

Help children improve their addition and subtraction skills with NEW Splash Dash! Starting with simple number sentences and progressing right up to 5 column addition and subtraction, the game can be played with children between the ages of 5 and 11.

The Splash Dash leader board gives children an extra incentive to practise their calculations - children earn stars as they play, helping their school to climb a leader board as a reward for their hard work.

Search for Splash Dash or Miner Birds.

NEWcontent

Busy Code – a whole NEW programming area!

Our brand NEW Busy Code area gives teachers a suite of tools for introducing programming concepts step by step; teaching children how to create, run and debug simple programs.

The funky Beard Man character is sure to create pupil engagement as children learn to program him to walk, dance and collect

stars – or in more technical terms they will learn coding basics through to repeat loops, conditionals, events and variables! They’ll be creating their own “call and

response” game in no time!

Busy Code programs are built by linking simple blocks together - drag and drop the blocks to assemble a program, they will snap together like jigsaw pieces!

  • Downloadable and online teacher guide

  • Tutorials, challenges and projects

 • Create prog

rams by

 link

ing bloc

ks to

gether

Go to Search. Select Coding activity type. >>

NEWcontent

Religious education area expanded with NEW Judaism resources!

Busy Things now includes a comprehensive set of resources all about Judaism! Six NEW labelling activities are available to you including...

- Parts of a synagogue - The Jewish calendar- Major Jewish holy days- Major Jewish holidays- Kosher or not?

Plus 12 NEW writing projects covering many different aspects of Judaism including...

- Yom Kippur- Shabbat- Passover

Busy Things writing projects give children access to a wide range of photographs and clipart.

Search for Judaism.

NEWcontent

100+ NEW Interactive worksheets across the curriculum

There are over 100 NEW worksheets available across the whole curriculum!

Children can label diagrams, classify and categorise items and put things into order, here are just a few examples:

ENGLISH – From ordering words and letters to sorting nouns and grammatical terms to labelling parts of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

MATHS – a huge worksheet area! Categorising shapes, ordering numbers, sorting common multiples and putting measurements on a scale to name just a few!

FRENCH AND SPANISH – labelling body parts, colours and food items

GEOGRAPHY – labelling of oceans, continents and countries plus identifying features of different habitats

And many many more subjects!!

Teachers can assign worksheets giving you the ability to test knowledge and monitor children’s progress.

AND all our interactive worksheets can also be saved as PDFs for use away from the screen.

Go to Search. Select Interactive worksheets. >>

NEWfeature

Log in now to start using the brand NEW teacher-feature in Busy Things - Assignments.

Our NEW assignments area can be used with content from all age bands.

Located within Teacher tools on the welcome screen, the Assignments area can help you quickly gain an understanding of your children’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

Assign worksheets, topic work and quizzes for children to complete in class or at home and then view individual and whole class results.

  • The Assignments area can be found within Teacher tools on the home screen

  • Current Assignments

  • Quiz_results are displayed in a table

  • Worksheet results can be printed out for record keeping or classroonm display

Monitor progress with NEW Assignments area

NEWfeature

NEWfeature

Find inspiration in the Top 40

Quickly find resources for special events

Want to know what other schools are using? Get a glimpse of the most popular games and activities across the 1000s of schools using Busy Things in the NEW Top 40 area.

Looking for some topical inspiration? Check out the NEW special events calendar with cross-curricular activities grouped under a selection of festivals, day, week and month long events – from national story telling week to Halloween, Christmas to the European day of languages!

NEW& improved

Project work made easy with NEW Busy Paint and Publisher

Children will love creating project work with the NEW Busy paint and publisher. There are 100s of templates to choose from with lots of lovely new easy to use features.

The brand NEW set of paint tools includes a wide range of brushes and effects enabling children to easily create imaginative pictures.

Children can now import photographs of their own, utilise the Busy Things photobank or the comprehensive clipart library! Clipart can be rotated, scaled and flipped with our NEW easy-to-use interface.

Even more exciting - Busy Paint and publisher can now be used on tablets as well as desktops and laptops.

  • Design a superhero writing project

  •NEW toolset

 • Ex

tens

ive ph

oto an

d clipart b

anks

  • scale, flip & rotate

  • pirate clipart

Go to Search. Select Tools activity type. >>

  • 100s of writing and painting templates availab

le

NEW& improved

Make fabulous charts & graphs with our NEW Busy Graph Maker

Our Busy graph maker lets children quickly enter data they have collected and see it displayed in a colourful chart or graph. Children can easily switch between chart types to see their data displayed in different ways.

More options become available as children get older. Start with simple pictograms, then move on to bar charts, line graphs and pie charts. Older children can even compare up to four data sets.

Graphs can be saved and edited in a later session. Save as PDF and print options are available for creating classroom displays. This tool is so easy to use - teachers will have their children creating wonderful graphs in no time at all!

Go to Search. Select Tools activity type. >>

NEW& improved

Get the most of Busy Things with a host of help!

& more...

Busy Things is packed full of powerful content and versatile features. To help you discover what’s available and make sure that you get the most out of it please do utilise the help button in teacher bar.

NB: The teacher bar is only visible when logging in to teacher mode with your teacher password.

Within help there is a comprensive user guide and a brand NEW videos area hosting 10 tutorials covering the many features of Busy Things and how to get the most out of your subscription.

NEW& improved

Teacher tools to make your life just that little bit easier!

Curriculum browser

Search tool

NEW Filters in menus

Speed up your lesson planning with easy to find curriculum aligned content!

Use this powerful curriculum search tool to find exactly what you need to match the objective for your lesson plan, quickly and easily!

You can add activities that match your objective to a setup’s favourite area for quick access during the lesson too.

The Curriculum browser is only available in Teacher Mode. You will need to use your Teacher password details to access this.

The search tool is great for quickly finding activities for particular topics and events - from the Romans to Rainforests, there’s a huge variety of writing and picture templates that will come in handy for both class and homework.

Just type in a search term and filter down your results by selecting an age range, subject and activity types.

Finding content is now even easier! Within activity menus you can now hide or display activity types by using the filter buttons in the top right.

NEWcontent

French and Spanish Flashcards and Interactive Worksheets

60+ Flashcards and interactive worksheets covering vocabulary and simple sentences. Topics include animals, body parts, classroom objects, colours, food and drink, months of the year and numbers.

Go to Search. Select the ‘Languages’ subject.

Play on....

Desktops & laptops

Tablets

Whiteboards!

We are here to help! Please contact us with any questions you may have about Busy Things.

Tel: 01332 364963    Email: lgfl@busythings.co.uk or trustnet@busythings.co.uk