Our Top 5 Education Resources

Our latest numbers are in, showing the five most viewed ACTF support materials during Term Two. Could these popular teaching resources be used in your classroom next term?

1. My Place for Teachers

The My Place for Teachers website provides rich educational material to support primary and lower-secondary teachers using the My Place TV series in the classroom. The website features cross-curricular teaching materials related to series 1 and 2, and is a valuable tool for those entering this year’s My Place Competition.

2. The Inbestigators Teaching Toolkit

Mystery series like The Inbestigators are so engaging partly because they position readers as active participants in solving a crime. They put themselves in the detectives' shoes and collect clues alongside them, paying close attention to what the detective thinks, sees, does, and says. 

With our recently released Teaching Toolkit for this series, Year 3-6 students will practise making inferences, examine plot, and more. Tasks will help students to understand the mystery genre, and build the knowledge and skills necessary for them to craft their own engaging mystery stories.

Lessons can be approached individually or incorporated into a longer unit on the mystery genre. Learning tasks in The Inbestigators Teaching Toolkit are aligned to the Australian Curriculum, with links made to English, Critical and Creative Thinking, and Personal and Social Capability.

3. Backyard Science: Primary Teaching Resource

This interactive teaching and learning tool was created for non-specialist science educators. Based on the Backyard Science television series, the resource promotes the development of scientific literacy for students in Years 4-7. It contains 40 teaching strategies for classroom experiments, 80 video clips, detailed science content notes, student worksheets, interactive games and links to additional web resources. Learning tasks links to the 5Es teaching framework, and video clips feature children conducting experiments based on scientific discovery, investigation, problem solving and curiosity about our world.

The Backyard Science 2: Primary and Secondary Teaching Resource contains additional content for Chemical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences.

4. Paper Planes – ‘The Circling Clive’ plane template

‘The Circling Clive’ is a paper plane design that makes its on-screen debut as one of character Dylan's original creations in the film Paper Planes.

Originally created by THE PAPER PILOTS, this Fold 'n' Fly PDF provides students with the information they requite to recreate the original Clive design.

The double-sided worksheet includes step-by-step instructions, and a paper plane template with dotted fold lines and numbering.

5.Paper Planes – Novel and Film Comparison

Through this unit of work, written by Wendy Bean, students examine the visual and printed texts of the Paper Planes (feature film and novel). The novel is based on the motion picture screenplay Paper Planes, and is written by Steve Worland.

This unit of work explores a range of themes touched on in the novel and film including loss, relationships, connectedness, friendship, independence and competition. Students are encouraged to generate questions and write about how the themes relate back to them and their own life experiences. Together with this, the unit encourages students to further develop their skills of writing persuasive and procedural texts related to the Paper Planes novel and film.