Through The TPet Keyhole – Superheroes, Dragons and Gorillas

Long Time, No Speak!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a behind the scenes blog, so it’s only right that I get another one ready and prepped for you all. Now since my last blog, we’ve had two new staff members join us, a very talented Graphic Designer called Emily and the second addition to our teaching team Phil, who is our Key Stage 2 specialist. They join the team as we look to further expand our team, and they’ve certainly been welcome additions. They fit in like a glove! They, along with the rest of the team have been working on some AMAZING new projects, including the latest term of Wellbeing Wednesday.

No Distractions From a Certain Elf

That’s right, Gary is gone (for now). You’d have last heard off of him at Christmas around the time of my last blog. He was causing havoc left, right and centre, always trying to disrupt filming. At the end of the holidays, he decided to send himself packing and swan off abroad. It’s alright for some isn’t it! Now rumour has it he settled down in the Bahamas, it seems travel restrictions don’t apply to elves…

On With The Show – Let’s Start With Wellbeing Wednesday

I’ve got LOTS to show you, in fact lots might actually be an understatement. So how about we start with Wellbeing Wednesday? Wellbeing Wednesday is always a HUGE undertaking, because the amount of planning, designing and work that goes into it is incredible. As someone who absolutely has no semblence of graphic design merit, it blows my mind that our design team are able to create such stunning creations in such a short amount of time.

It was a perfect chance for our new starter Emily to show off her creativity. She has assisted in the creation of all 12 characters, taking on 6 with Beck taking the other 6. The project shows us how important collaboration is, as you can see above. Meg and Emily have also been working together on the amazing comics you have seen that follow on from the story of the animation.

As well as the resources and comic, Wellbeing Wednesday wouldn’t be complete without an animation. For the third term running, Beck has been working on some incredible new animations for our Mental Health Heroes. It’s a lengthy process, and I’ve not a scooby on how she manages it, but manage it she does. We can honestly say that these latest animations are AMAZING, so make sure you are checking them out when they go live every Sunday.

It’s not just our graphic designers though, it’s also the teaching element of the term. Phil got stuck into helping to develop the scheme, to help create 12 weeks of exciting activities for you and your class to enjoy.

Travel Back In Time

Now this one really is a sneak peek, so I won’t be able to reveal too much, but the team have begun work on a brand new topic pack for you to get your mitts around. It’s going to be chock full of fun activities and learning opportunities in your classroom. We’re doing this topic pack a little differently to how we usually do other topic packs, as this will be segmented up. And as you can probably guess from the picture below, the pack involves Greece and Ancient Greece.

You can still expect the same fantastic resources you’ve come to expect from Teacher’s Pet, such as:

• Impressive Power Points
• Knowledge Organiser
• Curriculum Map
• Display Borders and Banners
• Comprehensions

And so much more!

Celebrating St George’s Day

St George is the patron saint of England, the legend goes that he slayed a dragon in Cappadocia (or Libya, depending on which version of the legend you believe). But as it’s a time of celebration in this country, we figured it was only right to get creating some resources to use in your classroom to teach the story, including this brilliant dragon drawn by Emily below!

Meg also got her hands on some more crafts as well with creating the St George split pin. I think she may have had a bit too much fun in making the video for it though…

When St George isn’t dancing dragons to their death, he is being used on a wide variety of classroom resources, including How to Slay a Dragon, Writing Speech Bubbles, Information Texts + Comprehensions and much more! It’s also chock full of other resources including Design Your Own Shield.

Teach Rex

As you might already be aware, we entered into a fantastic exclusive partnership with Teach Rex last year, the Totally ROARRRSOME company based in Liverpool, UK, who visit schools with their incredible dinosaur costumes, to teach all about these marvelous beasts, providing a completely unique live experience. We’ve been working on some fresh new resources for you to be able to access, in addition to our previous Teach Rex work to accompany their visit to your school.

But… We have been working on Teach Rex resources for another animal! That’s right, no dinosaurs or dragons on this one. Now until it’s official release, I can’t really give you many details on these. But I have been able to grab a pic of some in progress work for you to check out, so without delaying you any further…

Team Bonding

There is no doubt, the team work extremely hard at what they do. But just like any team, it’s impossible to work at 100% for every single hour of the work day. It’s important that, especially in the current climate, we try to encourage team bonding (even more so with having two new starters). So that’s exactly what we did! Lockdown meant we couldn’t go out of the office, so we brought the fun and games inside instead!

Imagine the surprise. I get up to the office, only to find the company logo has been covered up by the Wellbeing Academy logo, and then I step inside and the entire place has been transformed into a Wellbeing Academy, everyone has got masks on, and there is about 7 trillion games all across the office academy.

They certainly went to town with making the office look very wellbeing themed

We can’t forget a couple of the games either…

We had a sensory game, where we had to guess the sound, remember what we saw and guess what we felt (which led to some interesting guesses). We also had to choose 1 person from each team to turn into a superhero.

That’s All Folks

For now at least. Hopefully you enjoyed this behind the scenes look into what we’ve been getting up to in the office! The rest of 2021 is set to be an incredibly busy year for the team, and we’ll be sure to have more behind the scenes content for you over the coming months. Until then, I’m signing off.

Stay safe