Tag: active literacy

Teacher Champions – Maddiston Primary School

Over the past few months Lesley Haston, class teacher at Maddiston Primary School in Falkirk, has been working closely with her colleague Laura Fowlie on a Mairi Hedderwick-inspired project as part of the Scottish Book Trust Authors Live Teacher Champions Programme.

Lesley and Laura’s P2 pupils were inspired by the Katie Morag series.

The children started this project by watching the Author’s Live event with Katie Morag author, Mairi Hedderwick.

They discussed if any of the children had read these books before or seen the new TV programme. They read a different Katie Morag story every week.

In groups the children wrote about the characters from Katie Morag using adjectives and we displayed these on the wall. They came up with words such as toerag, mischievous, cheeky, old, hardworking, etc

Exploring Scottish culture through play

The children had a Scottish themed play afternoon where they had opportunities to choose a variety of different activities. They could build the New Pier out of construction, they curled paper to make Alecina’s sheep’s coat, they wrote down the ingredients for haggis, played in the water with boats and ferries, listened to Scottish music, decorated thistles and created Plasticine Nessies.

Learning about picture book construction

They wanted the children to learn more about the production of picture books in preparation for them producing their own. They had a visit from illustrator and print maker Cate James; she explained the picture book making process and took the children through the storyboarding process. The children had a fantastic time and we have been using this idea in our language lessons, they are eager to create their own characters and story books.

Inspired by the island-living theme in the Katie Morag series, the main focus for the project was to produce a piece of extended writing in the form of a travel brochure. The children were split into seven co-operative groups named after a Commonwealth country. They worked together and found out lots of facts and information about their country from the national dress and food to famous landmarks and people. Once they had collated all this information, they used it to write their travel brochure. They had to come up with their own company name, prices and accommodation options on their island. The children worked extremely hard on their brochures and the results were brilliant. Everyone was asked to present their brochure to our Headteacher. Every pupil was awarded a Katie Morag book of their very own for their hard work.

To round off the project we held a ceilidh and invited along their grandparents. It was a massive success and the turnout for it was overwhelming. The children had practiced Scottish songs, poems and highland dances to entertain and involve their special guests. They had fantastic feedback and the children were so pleased at who came to see and hear them. The children also shared their extended writing project with their visitors and it was lovely to hear all the amazing comments.

Alongside all of this, the children were rehearsing for their forthcoming class assembly. They performed to parents and the whole school to tell them what we had been learning. Each child was given a part to play in our assembly such as sportsman, flag bearer, Scottish dancer, Katie Morag characters and narrators. They learned songs and poems to accompany the assembly and supplied costumes to enhance the performance.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed all of the activities and opportunities that they have been given throughout the project. They have been so enthusiastic and produced some of their best work. The project has also been included in their Enterprise Award accreditation where we are hoping to achieve our Platinum award.

What happens in Active Literacy Reading? Sharing Learning with Families

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer, Services and School Improvement Team has developed a range of materials to share with parents and carers about what happens in their children’s classrooms.

Mums, grans, aunties, big sisters and little sisters from St. Patricks R.C.P.S. in Denny shared one of these experiences at their ‘Girls Night In’.

Sharon demonstrated how teachers use a range of texts (in this case, Michael Rosen’s ‘Chocolate Cake’ poem) to develop the six reading comprehension strategies.

Firstly, the ‘big’ girls had a competition to see how many types of chocolate bars and how many characters they could spot in the ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ film trailer. This was a close competition! Sharon then ascertained their prior knowledge and experience of ‘chocolate’ by asking some open questions and asking the girls to put the word ‘chocolate’ into a sentence.

A recital of Michael Rosen’s ‘Chocolate Cake’ poem was well received with lots of giggles and laughter. The girls then drew ‘visualisers’ demonstrating their knowledge of the main ideas in the poem. One girl was able to make excellent comparisons between Bruce Bogtrotter (Matilda) and the little boy in the poem – very impressive!

The girls then eloquently answered a range of questions relating to inference. When asked what the little boy should have for his play piece after sneaking up in the middle of the night and demolishing a whole chocolate cake, the girls replied “Nothing!” or “Well, maybe a piece of fruit!”

The session concluded with the girls all trying out a sample of chocolate cake, whilst at the same time offering some fantastic adjectives to describe the smell, taste and whole experience.

All of the girls left the workshop with big smiles on their faces (and maybe a few sticky, icky fingers!).

Feedback from this session  included:

I liked the poem about the little boy who liked the chocolate cake.

Direct quote: I like the poam wif a litel boy wot likt choclt caik.  (Primary 1)

It was very good – I loved the story of the cake – thank you (Sophie P3)

We enjoyed hearing the story of the chocolate cake – we had lots of laughs during the session.

Good idea to introduce Literacy activities this time!

Chocolate cake workshop was worthwhile – something a bit different!

We wish we had visited the chocolate cake workshop – heard lots of good things about it.

More sessions like this are coming soon to a school near you! For further information, please contact Sharon.wallace@falkirk.gov.uk

I Like Big Books!

Larbert High School has highlighted the value of reading in this parody you tube video entitled ‘I like big books’.

The video can be viewed by clicking on this link.

 It was produced as part of Literacy Week 2013.

Active Literacy is used in all Falkirk establishments and aims to develop six key reading comprehension skills which are:

  1. Prior knowledge and understanding
  2. Metalinguistics
  3. Visualisation
  4. Inference
  5. Main ideas
  6. Summarising and paraphrasing.

All six comprehension skills are explicitly modelled and taught and pupils then apply these skills across a wide range of texts across a variety of genres.

Talking and Listening – Spelling Strategies – Skills for Life.

Larbert High School has produced a new you tube video relating to Talking and Listening highlighting the importance of  literacy skills.

 The short you tube video is a parody of Ant and Dec’s ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rumble’ entitled ‘Let’s Get Ready to Mumble’.

The video can be viewed from this link.

The video was launched at Larbert High’s Literacy week 2014 where there were a variety of literacy activities on offer, including ‘Spelling Bee’ which incorporates Active Literacy spelling strategies introduced in Falkirk Council primary schools. More information about these exciting literacy activities can be found by reading the article in our local newspaper The Falkirk Herald.

The Active Literacy Spelling programme aims to provide children with a range of strategies they are able to apply to tricky words in all curricular areas.

Practical Solutions for Early Intervention

This document ‘Practical Solutions for Early Intervention’ can be found in all Falkirk Council early level establishments.

It contains practical examples of learning experiences aimed at talking and listening, reading and writing.

This is a valuable document and embraces the aims of Falkirk Council’s Literacy Strategy.

The scanned document can be accessed from here: Practical Solutions for Early Intervention.

For more information, please contact the Curriculum Support Team at Camelon Education Centre.

Developing Reading Skills Using Blooms

Mary Jalland at Westquarter Primary School attended a school based CAT session on reading where Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer for Falkirk Council, talked about using Blooms fans with pupils to develop deeper understanding of 'texts'.

 Mary went back to class and tried this out using 'The Gruffalo' as a text with some stunning results.

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Significant aspects of learning in literacy and English

Literacy skills are embedded within all the curriculum areas.  Teachers and learners will focus on developing the skills detailed in the Experiences and Outcomes.  Key aspects of learning within literacy and English relate to the way learners:

  • engage with and create a broad range of texts, including Scottish and Scots texts
  • use reading strategies to understand, analyse and evaluate texts
  • find and use information
  • develop critical literacy skills, including evaluating sources
  • write with increasing accuracy, making effective use of spelling, grammar and punctuation
  • create texts of increasing complexity using more sophisticated language
  • develop and use higher-order thinking skills.

Falkirk’s Curriculum Support Team will be delivering a range of professional learning opportunities this year  based around these significant aspects of learning in literacy.

These opportunities include a range of Active Literacy courses based around active strategies and methodologies for spelling and phonics, reading and writing, sharing good practice networks, higher order reading skills, effective questioning in literacy and using a range of media-linked genre to develop literacy skills.

Blogging About Active Literacy

Mary Jalland, Class Teacher at Westquarter Primary School, Falkirk, has created two Active Literacy blogs. Mary’s blogs are a great way of sharing effective teaching and learning in literacy, as well as sharing resources relating to the P1 and P2 Active Literacy programme. Mary has included links through to pupils demonstrating the Active Literacy strategies and methodologies, as well as a great explanation of Active Learning in their class.

Please visit: http://mrsjallandphonics.primaryblogger.co.uk/atspin/

http://mrsjallandphonics2.primaryblogger.co.uk/atspin/

Active Literacy – FAQs

 How can I support my child with their active literacy homework?

What is a phoneme? 

  • A letter or group of letters that make a single sound, for example, ‘oi’ or ‘a’.

What are Elkonin boxes?

  • These are used to teach phonemic awareness. Pupils listen out for the individual sounds and mark where they hear them in boxes.

What is diacritical marking?

  • Diacritical marking is the use of symbols to mark single sounds/ phonemes (e.g. b, p), joined phonemes (e.g. sh, ch) and split phonemes (magic e words). It is a spelling strategy which is used as part of the ‘Active Literacy’ approach in schools. It is usually taught at Primary 4 and 5, though can be continued and developed in the upper stages. There are three parts to the code: a single dot which represents a single phoneme, a line which represents a joined phoneme and an arch which represents a split phoneme.

What is Reciprocal Teaching?

  • This is a strategy used during Active Learning where children will work together to support and challenge each other. They may adopt roles such as ‘word reader’ or ‘word writer’.

Which spelling strategies are taught at school and how I can support my child with this?

  • There are many spelling strategies taught in school. Some of the ‘fun’ spelling tasks which are used to learn common or tricky words include: Rainbow writing, fancy writing, spell-er-cise, bubble writing, big and little writing, type-em-up, rhyming words, newspaper letters and triangle spelling. Other strategies taught are: syllabification, mnemonics, words within words, word shape, spelling rules and compound words.

Active Approaches to Literacy – Early Level

Within Falkirk Council, we believe in the importance of developing literacy skills within the Early Years through experiential play and the transferring of these skills to everyday life. Our document provides an overview for staff of active approaches to literacy within Curriculum for Excellence Early Level. Click the hyperlink to access the document:

Active Approaches to Literacy July 2014