Yesterday I worked with a group of teachers thinking about developing children’s inference skills. As we talked about the range of strategies that we needed to offer in our classrooms, I was reminded once again of the power of synonyms in reading. I quite often see synonyms being taught for writing purposes, e.g. other words for ’said’ but rarely for reading purposes.
Coherence inference looks at how we make sense of a text as we move through it; how pronouns link back to nouns and how we use anaphoric reference, in other words how we use synonyms to refer to objects or people throughout a text so that we don’t repeat the same word or phrase. For instance the text might mention ‘the ship’ towards the beginning and then move onto ‘this vessel’, we might have tigers, big cats and these animals. In both these instances as we move through the text the synonym becomes less precise or more generic. This can also be linked to antonyms which are opposites. I remember my class sitting an end of KS2 reading test and thinking if only they understood the title of the reading paper ‘Friend or Foe’ they would get so much more understanding out of it.
So, how can we help children extend their understanding of synonyms?
One of the first places I would explore with children is a thesaurus. Have a look at the synonyms for the noun ship in the concept thesarus
collect synonyms and order them along a continuum. These could then be recorded on those paint sample cards to show degrees of intensity. What order would you put these synonyms for cold; arctic, bitter, chilly, brisk, nippy?
There are several games that are worthwhile for children to play try hereand here
for a get up and go game give each child a piece of paper with a word at the top. Everyone writes one synonym for that word on their piece of paper and then on the say so all move seats and write a synonym on the piece of paper they are now sitting at. Keep going for as many moves as possible. Go back to original word and share the synonyms with a partner.
Using non-chronological reports, text mark all words used to refer to the object that the report is about. For example on this great websitethere are several synonyms for lions in the first snippet of information. However in the longer text, which you can see as you scroll down, the word lions is used each time they are referred to. For me as a reader it feels a bit clunky.
We have been following up our Talk for Writing training by working with children in schools and have started to develop banks of games and activities.
Warming up the wordactivities can be played at any point in the teaching sequence and whenever there is a spare 5 minutes.
If you have any activities that could be added please email me, leave a comment or contact me through twitter (@joysimpson) and I will add you to the presentation.
I talked to a group of boys today about writing and how they felt about it. Their responses were perceptive and showed a way forward for those of us working with them.
What do you like to write about?
This brought up the usual things such as aliens, the future, dragons and comic heroes. When I suggested that they could make comics on the web they didn’t really believe me. My favourite place to do this at the moment is ArtisanCam’s Super Hero Comic Maker.
The group wanted the freedom to write about what they were interested in and it seems to me that this is one place where blogging could be useful. If we introduce children to blogs and start to comment on them we will eventually create a blogging community within the classroom. Then we can talk about the different types of blog and the children can write about what interests them.
What helps you to write?
Here the boys were adamant that they needed to ‘do’ things and then write about them. I would not dispute this fact and many teachers are actively engaged in providing first hand experiences for the class. But how do we move children on from this to being able to write about the thoughts and ideas that are in their heads rather than those that they have directly experienced? Pie Corbett has some examples of developing the ’seeing’ inside your head and doing that ‘mad stary thing’ where you focus your concentration on the images in your head and find words to describe them.
These ideas will certainly give us something to think about as we plan the next few weeks literacy sessions. What do your class think about writing and what do they like to write about most?
Whilst I was looking for the comic url I came across the picture book maker. This is fantastic.
As part of our animating project we wanted to work with the kit that schools already had as this can be one of the barriers to creating animations in the classroom. In the end we didn’t but that is another story! However, on my travels through animations Tim Brook told me that 2Animate can be imported into Windows MovieMaker and he was right!
The trick is to import the animation as a picture not a video as the animation is saved as a .gif file. This was where I had been going wrong. So now we can do more with the animation. Fantastic. And just to show you here is a dreadful animation I made earlier.
Somebody else told me that you could use a webcam with 2Animate but I can’t find a way. Is it possible? If so please let me know.
I have been on a hunt for online animations to use in Literacy teaching and have come across some fantastic ones. They are all available on YouTube and sometimes on other hosting sites as well. The easiest way to use the animations is to download them.
Oktapodi directed by Julien Bocabeille and Francois-Xavier Chanioux made me laugh out loud. It reminds me of Finding Nemo. See it here and if you can’t access YouTube try here.
I am becoming a little obsessed with animations made using sticky notes. Yellow Sticky Notes by Jeff Chiba Stearn is wonderful. Thi s would be a more interesting outcome for the Yr6 unit on biography and autobiography.
To see all the animations that I am collecting go to our YouTube channel and subscribe so that you are notified when new video is added.
As an authority we are taking part in an animation and poetry project entitled Persistence of Vision. Through a group of schools, consultants, animators and academic mentors we are working together to create a framework of progression in animation that can be used by all primary schools.
One of the issues that we are exploring is what impact does watching animations have on children’s own animations. We watched Laughing Moon from the BFI Starting Stories and Love on the Wing from Story Shorts 2. These two animations were chosen becuase of the links that they had to the poetry units in Yr 2 – Patterns on the Page (Laughing Moon) and the use of imagery in Yrs5 and 6 (Love on the Wing).
Learning and Teaching Scotland has some interesting ideas for creating animations in powerpoint that follow on from Laughing Moon. And this idea using sticky post-its is fantastic for playing around with patterns! This video, Trade Tatoo, from the GPO film unit is yet another great way of using patterns.
Below are the animations created by the teachers working in pairs.
So much has been happening recently that I thought I would highlight some of the best resources that have been shared with me recently.
The first idea is from a school that is looking at writing instructions. We decided to cook (and write) like Jamie Oliver and so looked for video clips that could be shown in school. Here the Sainsbury’s advert for fishcakes gives a taste of what he is like. When you read Jamie’s recipes it is the verb choice that really stands out. Verbs that you might expect to find are cut, chop, slice, mix and pour. What you find is something a little different, e.g. pile up, tear, chuck in, smear and glug. These were in the Jamie Oliver in Italy. For other recipes look here. I like the introduction to each recipe. These make a great model for children to use. I’m looking forward to cooking in the style of Jamie!
Stories of the Dreaming is a wonderful Australian storytelling site. After each video is a transcript of the story and a commenting section. This would be a great way to introduce children to australian storytelling and commenting on sites. Well worth a visit.
And finally, a word game to use with KS2. DeepLeap the fast-paced time wasting word game. The letters look like scrabble and children can call out the words they can see for you or another child to type in. Let us know what your highest score is. The Devon Primary ScITT trainees achieved 785.
I worked with a school last week on talk for writing and we looked briefly at inventing texts. I took the following characters along with me.
In order that children start to invent texts we need to hook them into what they know already so I drew the characters out of a bag one at a time and asked what stories do you know that have a character like this in it?
For the shark, people obviously suggested Jaws (there has to be a series of dance lessons in this soundtrack) and linked in to an overcoming the monster type story. There was a lot of blood and lost limbs in these stories. As we kept going we started to think about stories where the sharks had lost their teeth - more traditional and in the style of The Leopard who Lost his Spots.
Once Barbie came out we couldn’t think of any stories with her as a character but if we took her as a symbol of a young female character we thought of the girl who lost her leg, a mermaid who swam to the depths of the ocean to recover the shark’s lost teeth or Pamela Anderson!
Groups then set off to devise their own story, acting like magpies and borrowing some of the good ideas from the shared section.
Although we didn’t have time, the next activity would have been to map the story that had been generated and then to start the retelling. Here the teacher’s role is to encourage the use of appropriate story language.
We did however, try the same activity as a non-fiction text and guess what? It works. We mapped what we know about sharks onto a non-chronological skeleton and then orally retold one of the paragraphs.
I am not a reader of graphic novels but decided that I needed to investigate them. I feel deprived if I don’t learn something new in the summer holidays! As ever, I wondered whether I could use them to help children develop meaning making skills and ’see’ devices that can be used in writing.
The first thing I did was to read Adventures in Graphica – Using Comics and Novels to teach comprehension by Terry Thompson. The one thing this book did was reassure me that the skills and knowledge I had aquired as reader were equally relevant in graphic novels. What he does very clearly is set out what is special about this form of novel or non-fiction by describing the conventions: layout, panels, speech bubbles, narrative boxes, lettering, directionality, importance of the pictures and the gutters.
With these in mind I decided to do a bit of reading of grahica. I chose BabyMouse- Puppy Love by Jennifer Holm and Matthew Holm as I was interested in those that were written with girls in mind, and Clan Apis by Jay Hosler. This is a non-fiction text about bees and their life. This is particularly pertinent as my allotment neighbour has just set up his first hive and swarm of bees.
BabyMouse is written in black and white with shades of pink used throughout. The pink denotes when BabyMouse is dreaming about or imagining items of desire (cakes and pets). There is a very all-knowing narrator (omniscient ) who quite often questions BabyMouse to move the story on especially when it might be take too much time to draw what is happening, e.g. Where did they all go, BabyMouse?’. A character study of BabyMouse would be interesting. Self-centred is my opinion but the clues to this are really quite subtle. I am hooked!
Clan Apis is written by an expert in bees. I had no idea that graphic texts also covered non-fiction. From the reading of this I now know an awful lot more about bees. This book is not read as a non-fiction text using a contents or index page to find the information that you want but is read from cover to cover as a fiction book would be. The additional facts about bees are written in a traditional non-fiction form with graphics as diagrams.
This is a much longer book and is divided into chapters. I was more aware as I read this book of the panels and graphics and how they directed your eyes to the next section with a much greater variety than BabyMouse. This is not a value judgement, merely a comment on the differences. As the story of Clan Apis is much more complex than BabyMouse you might expect a wider variety of shapes and positions on the page to be used. I intend to go back and study these in more detail, investigating how the panels show pace in the text.
Have a look at the end story of Clan Apis and what happened to Jay Hosler whilst studying bees.
So what next? I need to read more graphic novels/comic books and I need to start using them in guided reading because it is usually children who show me what I need to know about books. I’ll let you know what they teach me?
We launched our boys writing project today. It was a good morning where we explored some of the ideas that might be investigated in the classroom.
We are using the lesson study model of CPD for this project. I first read about lessons study in a wonderful book, The Teaching Gap by James Stigler and James Hiebert. The researchers compared maths teaching practices in Japan, Germany and America in order to look at teaching and how to improve it. Part of their argument is that teaching is a cultural activity determined by our beliefs and habits and that these are stable and not easily changed particularly when the system is so complex. And teaching is complex. They also argue that in trying to accomplish too much we may well have sacrificed opportunities for small, cummulative improvements.
Japan however, gives great value to small improvements. Lesson study is based upon long-term, continuous improvement, maintains a focus on pupil learning, focuses on improving teaching in context and is collaborative. Teachers who participate in lesson study see themselves as contributing to the development and knowledge about teaching as well as their own professional development.
We have slightly adapted the model to suit our cirucmstances but are uisng the plan, teach, observe and review structure of the Japanese model.
Plan – we are working in a team of 3, 2 teachers and 1 consultant and together will plan a lesson. this lesson will be anchored within a teaching sequence. We will be thinking about the barriers to learning for the boys and how we might overcome them. Because we have all planned it, this lesson belongs to no-one thus taking the focus off any one teacher. We may well have done some reading of research into boys writing to inform us and provide some ideas to trial.
Teach – one of us will teach the lesson or part of a lesson.
Observe – the other two will observe the children, in this case boys, making notes about their behaviours, learning and difficulties
Review – finally we will discuss our observations of the learning in detail, what worked, what didn’t and why. Time will be then spent thinking about how what we now know will impact on the next lesson.
And finally teachers share what they have learnt. We have set up a blog for teachers to discuss their learning with others in the project. This is private at the moment because only 1 person out of the 30 people present has blogged before. As confidence grows we will share some of the posts and learning on this blog.
We are looking for those small steps in learning and change in practice that are sustainable. After all , I am sure you know the saying ‘When a butterfly flaps its wings in…..’
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