Welcome teachers and educators! Please find below our current online resources offer for Primary Education (Years 3-6, KS2), including lesson plans, project templates, videos, podcasts, forums, CPD and more! We’ve also included a few things that you as teachers might find interesting, like our public lectures, MOOCs and podcasts. This is the current offer from the UoS and our partners – we are curating our favourite engagement resources from around the world here.
All our resources for teachers have been created with partner teachers from local schools and colleges – if you’d like to share your knowledge and expertise and work with us on creating future resources, or there’s a particular area of the curriculum and beyond that you’d like us to create resources for, we’d love to hear from you! Email talk2us@soton.ac.uk.
Where a password is required, use ‘disco’.
Science and Engineering Festival
Southampton Science and Engineering Festival (SOTSEF) is the University of Southampton’s annual award-winning interdisciplinary science festival that allows everyone to explore and discover what the world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) has to offer.
For British Science Week join an interdisciplinary journey of discovery with a series of free events, downloadable resources and content on-demand, accessible to everyone across the world.
If you can make it to Southampton, Science and Engineering Day, our free family-friendly event packed with hundreds of interactive activities, workshops, live shows, art performances and laboratory tours, will be back on campus.
Green Stories have just published an anthology of climate solutions wrapped in short stories called No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. Each story links to a webpage where readers can find out more how to make the solutions a reality. We compiled it originally to inspire COP27 delegates. The anthology made the ‘Top of the COP’, newsletters, and we contributed to several sessions about the role of storytelling in raising understanding of the climate crisis. However, the stories are great reads in their own right, and so we have made it available more widely. The anthology and associated website might be a useful resource for those teaching sustainability.
Welcome to the autism transitions project. This project is a collaboration between The University of Southampton and Aviary Nursery, Eastleigh. Together, we are finding out more about the experiences of transition of autistic children from preschool to primary school.
Young autistic children are amongst the most scrutinised and assessed in their everyday lives, often leading to characterisations and descriptions that focus on their difficulties (commonly termed ‘deficits’) and challenges rather than on their abilities, strengths and positive experiences.
This project is about changing the way we think and talk about autistic children in order to develop a more holistic understanding of who they are as a person. We do this through the creation of Digital Stories with children, families and staff members.
Digital Stories are short videos that focus on the child’s perspective. The stories show the child doing the things they like doing, and how they interact and communicate with others. Children’s voices and views are, therefore, at the centre of the research.
The idea for the Stories came about because we wanted to find a way for all children to contribute their views, experiences and perspectives to educational decision-making. We drew upon previous work funded by the ESRC that provided insights into the experiences, contexts, and culture of learning experiences for children with autism.
This project is from the ACoRNS group.
ACoRNS has collaborated with illustrator Sam Davies, Tracie Raufi (Assistant Headteacher-Curriculum and Head of Art and Design) and autistic students at New Forest School to co-produce a comic about the transition to secondary school. The comic tells the story of Lee Mouse who is getting ready for his first day at secondary school The storyline reflects the voices and experiences of autistic students, as well as some of the strategies that they identified that support their well-being at school. These include having positive and understanding relationships with staff members, a safe space to go to decompress, and an opportunity to talk through worries and fears.
(ATE) Ecology, Nature & Biodiversity: The Dinosaur on Your Window Sill
Talk directly to our researchers, students and a diverse community of ecology enthusiasts! Share photos, videos and questions plus daily challenges! Stay engaged with nature from your home.
Help our scientists analyse images and short video clips of the Aurora!
Support real, current research into this mysterious phenomenon which effects our weather, satellites and more.
Learn about the science behind the Northern Lights.
At the University of Southampton, we’re very lucky to have some truly inspirational speakers visit us! During the lockdown response to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many of these lectures were edited into bite-sized videos for you to watch from home!
You can also explore our archive of full-length public lectures, on a range of topics and with a diverse cast of distinguished speakers, here.
Bug Power: Energy & More from Waste
Try these Circular Bioeconomy puzzles, to find out how we use living things to help us make energy and new products from rubbish! These are based on research from out Water and Environmental Engineering Group, and partners in the Environmental Biotechnology Network.
A comprehensive toolkit for supporting young people including educational, cultural and wellbeing activities, information, advice and guidance
Southampton’s newest arts and heritage venue, God’s House Tower, has an exciting exhibition schedule which you can view here. There is something for everyone to enjoy – with many events free of charge.
Space to Create!
Our weekly family friendly sessions encourage creativity within the gallery! Come along on a Saturday between 11am-1pm for these free, drop-in family workshops!
Upcoming exhibition programme – this document has our upcoming exhibitions with how each show could link to the curricular.
Click here to download – Flyer
Click here to download – Upcoming Programme
Laura the Librarian’s Story Time!
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin!
Join Laura, a University of Southampton graduate and now a much-loved librarian for Tower Hamlets School Library Service, for a series of tales from around the world – and don’t forget to join in with the actions!
National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) Courses
Many of the NCCE CPD sessions for teachers are already available online, and more are being added regularly.
National Cipher Challenge – New Weekly Challenges!
Help Harry crack the codes and discover the secrets! Open to all ages and abilities. Join or create a team or individual entry to submit your answers for live marking – or have a go at past challenges in your own time and reveal answers to check your own work.
Great way to engage with Maths and Computing. Developed with IBM, GCHQ and other cipher/code-breaking experts!
Nurse Dotty Books by Molly Watts (UoS Graduate)
We’re so proud of our graduate student, now Nurse at Southampton General Hospital, who has created these wonderful books to help explain difficult topics such as Coronavirus (covid-19) to young children, giving them, “information without fear”.
Read/download ‘Dave the Dog is worried about coronavirus’ here for free.
See Molly’s work featured in Nursing Times and BBC News!
Sounds Are All Around
Click here to download – Sound Sheet 1
Click here to download – Sound Sheet 2
Southampton Cultural Education Partnership
ArtfulScribe
As part of their ongoing commitment to support writers of all ages and at all stages of their creative development, most of ArtfulScribe’s services have migrated to online platforms and are free to attend! With regards to children and young people, they are offering creative writing sessions as follows:
Junior Writers’ Club with Susmita Bhattacharya on a Wednesday morning from 9.30-11am for 7-11 yrs – sign-up by emailing juniorwritersclub@artfulscribe.co.uk
Safe4me
There are also useful additional updates, information, materials and resources given regularly through the Safe4me News E-bulletin. Sign up and contribute by emailing: schoolyouthengagement@hampshire.pnn.police.uk
Southern Universities Network (SUN) Resources
Resources for schools from our local partnership the SUN include careers and student resources, webinars and information for parents and carers to support their young people’s future decision making.
Southampton Young Archaeologists’ Club
Special Collections – Online Exhibitions
The University Hartley Library Special Collections Gallery was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund primarily for the display of material from the collections to encourage public awareness and access. The exhibition programme focuses on themes within the collection and links in with University academic activity including celebrations of research, conferences and contributions to national and international events and commemorations – and many have parallel online exhibitions which can be viewed via the link above!
Turner Sims: Cordelia Williams, Playing the Steinway Piano
If you are craving serenity, watch the first in a series of four stunning films from pianist Cordelia Williams, in which she plays the beautiful Turner Sims Steinway piano in the concert hall at Highfield campus. In this initial film, Cordelia serenades us with Mozart’s Rondo No 3, K511.
Wincester Science Centre – Science @ Home
Educational, inspirational and fun resources from Winchester Science Centre, from weekly Curiosity Challenges and DIY science videos to spectacular science demonstrations and fun and fascinating facts!
The Universi-tea Podcast!
Make yourself a soothing cup of tea and tune in for a series of interviews with staff and students from around the university, from The Designer in Pyjamas to The Real Indiana Jones! Watch the short trailer videos, and listen to episodes on Spotify, Listen Notes, Podchaser, Apple Podcasts or other podcast providers.
This National Geographic project shares (or ‘cross-pollinates’) approaches and tools between members of the public, scientists, technologists and educators in order to support pollinators, people and the practice of citizen science.
The resources and work programme are designed for registered schools in the UK and Italy, however, the project warmly welcomes everyone to get involved in the activities. All you need is an area of outdoor space (as small as 1m2) where you can create a small patch of habitat and a plant seeds suitable for pollinators.
When you sign up to the Pollinator Promise, you pledge to plant a pot or put aside a 1 x 1 metre area in your garden, school grounds or business to grow pollinator-friendly plants. These plants provide food and shelter for pollinating insects. These plants provide food and shelter for pollinating insects. The insects that pollinate around 80% of our food crops are at risk from loss of habitat, among a cocktail of other human induced threats, but you can help! Learn how you can support pollinators and bring the Pollinator Promise to your community.