A little lighthearted look at surviving the NC with time to teach the good stuff:-

1. Sing lots of songs – that’s poetry innit? Loads of great poems have been set to music so do them in assembly instead of hymns. No wait, hymns can be poetry too. 

2. Make ‘The Night Before Christmas’ your Christmas play – that’s poetry ‘an all. 

3. Rename all your PE teams with words like ‘necessary’ and set up kids as cheerleaders – give us an N, give us an E…put a big hopscotch patch in the playground with letters in the boxes and play ‘hop ‘n’ spell.

4. Route all your literacy through the periods of History you have to teach and kill those dodos with one stone. Seize the history as a chance to teach Philosophy too and you’ll have kids who can think beyond recounting dates and facts.

5. Teach coding not because you have to, but because it’s really, really cool – see this:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIu9yen5nc 

6. Teach the DT section because it’s also very cool, and you can get a lot of your Maths in here. You may have to sell your body to get a 3D printer. Andrew Beswick at Greaves Primary School in Marple has a great unit of work on building flying cars with double circuits linked to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with year 4. He didn’t need Michael Gove to tell him to do it.

7. Go on lots of trips – to museums and theatres and tick off the content as you go.

8. Play Music in the corridors and display signs saying what the piece is so that children learn composers’ works in changeover times. 

9. Display a cardboard image of a coffin in the foyer with the title ‘Dead Famous’ above it and get each class to nominate a famous ‘dead white dude’ to put in it each week.

10. Wait a few months until there’s a general election and then dump everything except numbers 4-7 because they are actually pretty excellent.