About Hamilton@Home

Hamilton Trust is an educational charity which supports primary teachers by providing top quality educational materials. The 'Save-Our-Sundays' teachers’ site is used by more than half the primary teachers in the country and has an excellent reputation. Many teachers are also parents, and they have suggested that we should provide some of our amazing resources for parents. This pilot site - Hamilton@Home is the first step toward creating a site which will be as useful to parents as the 'Save Our Sundays' is to teachers. We will offer realistic guidance and suggestions for helping children progress in their education and explanations as to how things are done in school and what parents can do to help. We also offer a wide raft of materials including animated stories, oral stories, colour, stick, make, design, puzzle and cook activities and ways to help a child with homework.

The Hamilton Team
The Hamilton Team is made up of five busy staff – working full-time and part-time - as well as a number of wonderful and committed freelancers and teacher consultants. Ruth Merttens co-directs the Hamilton Projects and is responsible for overseeing all the educational content on the Hamilton site. She dreams up the new initiatives, such as Code-Breakers, Topics and Early Years Packs, and then writes the materials and works closely with other authors as well. The resources on the site, from single resource sheets to integrated subject-teaching Topics, are her responsibility. Ruth also does a great deal of national in-service training, and talks to teachers up and down the country. She specialises in Early Years, Maths and Creative Teaching. The Project Manager is Deidre Holes, and she makes sure that we are all getting everything done as it should be and on time! Deidre, an ex deputy head & ICT inspector, co-ordinates all the freelance writers, artists, illustrators, animators and temporary office support staff. She is responsible for all the site maintenance, at the Hamilton end, and for overseeing and sustaining all the communications with site-users. She also tries to think up new initiatives (such as the Science Strands) and writes some of the materials for the site - particularly Literacy, Science and Topics. Ruth and Deidre are fortunate to work with Kay and Alison, two wonderful and meticulous assistants who help to ensure that the Hamilton materials and plans go up in time and with all the correct resources to accompany them. As well as a myriad of other duties, Alison answers many of the emails from our users, while Kay ensures that everything is running smoothly from the database side of life!

Jeanette, our fabulous Project Co-ordinator, runs Hamilton Education (www.hamiltoneducation.org.uk) with efficiency and flair! She helps to get the plans both on the web and on our SOS disks and also co-ordinates the resources that go into the Hamilton schools. Jeanette is also a mainstay of cheerful support for anything that needs doing in terms of sustaining the site, communicating with site-users and producing materials. No job is too small or too large! Diana co-ordinates our Early Years Projects and also works on some other Hamilton materials. To describe Diana as an ‘editor’, does not do justice to the skills that she has to employ on a daily basis in her role at Hamilton. She writes, designs, produces layouts and formats, answers some emails, creates resources and even concocts all the recipes for Early Years Packs, as well as baking delicious cakes for the office! We also have with a small team of freelance editors, who are wonderfully calm about being given deadlines of ‘yesterday’, and superbly efficient at spotting our writing idiosyncrasies and eliminating the worst of these. In addition, we have two fantastic illustrators who are also graphic designers and animators, and whose energy, creativity and commitment is legendary. Mike O’Regan co-directs the Hamilton Projects with Ruth and provides an oasis of calm intelligence in the midst of rush and panic!

But there would be no plans if there were no writers and Hamilton extends a huge Thank You to all who once were, or still are, busy writing Plans, Topics, Early Years Packs and other materials, so that the rest of us have our Sundays.