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Parents' and Guardians' Page

Thank you for showing interest in the Espresso Primary service.

Our Free Classroom Resources Area was put together for the purpose of providing teachers with example resources from the Espresso service that they can use with their pupils in a classroom setting. Unfortunately for this reason, we cannot provide access to non school-based users.

We hope to be able to offer a home-based service in the future and will keep you fully informed.

What is Espresso?
Helping your child learn:
Should I help my child with homework?
Research skills
Learning tips

What is Espresso?

Espresso Primary is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, and constantly growing digital library of high quality, innovative, video-rich cross-curricular resources. These are all

tailored to the National Curriculum and related to QCA schemes of work.

• It is intuitive to use, and quick to navigate.
• It is intended to meet the expectations of an audience used to high-quality television and sophisticated software.
• The service has been designed to link motivating and focused curriculum material from a wide selection of media with the latest news and feature stories from television and the Internet.
• The object has been to work alongside teachers and advisors to develop a number of subject and topic-based modules.

Helping your child learn:

Should I help my child with homework?

Reading

Generally, schools are very keen for parents to support and help children with their homework. However, there are times when schools will want to see what your children can do on their own. It is particularly important, as they get older, for your children to become increasingly independent in their learning. Schools generally take the view that children are likely to get more out of an activity if parents get involved - as long as they do not take over too much.

Remember that Espresso, although a powerful resource, is only one aspect of a child's work and learning. It is still important for children to have a balanced range of experiences and activities.

Research skills

You can help your child improve their research skills by:

Start early on when your child is learning to read. Ask them to find a page in a book, magazine or newspaper that matches their interests. They'll need good short-term memory skills to find it quickly. Show them how the contents page tells them where general topics are, whilst an index can show where specific information is. They could create their own glossary of key words.

Skimming and scanning - These are valuable reading skills. Skimming is where you pick up a general idea of what a piece of writing is about without reading every word. Start just by looking at headings and sub-headings. Read a page of any book (story or information) and agree on a sentence that says what it is about.

Scanning is where you find particular information, like dates or names. This can be fun to practice together as you can challenge each other to find certain words. When using a web page or word processing document, show them how to highlight the important bits to print - and then how to put them into their own words.

Your child needs to learn how to present information well. Children tend to simply copy whole sentences at first. Use skimming and scanning, as above, to identify general ideas and key facts. Give them a printout of a page and use colouring pencils or highlighter pens to mark the important bits. This is the start of good note-taking. Write down these key parts of the text - not whole sentences. Ask them to talk to you about the topic just from the notes.

You can build on this by playing a game where you have to talk about a topic for one minute only, including all the key information. One way of practising this is to watch a video/TV clip and ask them to tell you the key points after the sequence has finished.

Learning tips