Literacy Resources

When Night Didn’t Come by Poly Bernatene is a wordless picture book which offers a considerable level of challenge to read as well as being a visual feast.

The story tells of a village when the sun goes down and the panic when the moon doesn’t rise.  There are wonderful pictures of the mechanics of making the moon rise with villagers pulling up large bags of stars and throwing them into the sky.

The colours used in the pictures are rich with glowing oranges set against darker blues, greens and purples giving a slightly theatrical, if not magical feel to the story.  It is this element that reminds me of Leon and The Place Between by Grahame Baker-Smith.  In fact it would be wonderful if children could tell the story of night not coming in the style of Leon and The Place Between.  The language in that book is rich in patterning with a magical air about it.

I think this book would be most suitable for Yr4 children, particularly the imaginary worlds/fanstasy unit of literacy.  Wonderful!

Fans of wordless picture books will be familiar with Jeannie Baker’s work;  Window, Where the Forest Meets the Sea and Home.  The book of hers that I would most like to use in a literacy sequence is Mirror which I think fits very well with the Yr5 literacy unit stories from other cultures.

The book opens out to show two stories, one on either side of the cover.  Each book tells us the story of a child and their family, one living in Australia and one living in Morocco.    I think the book works best if you turn the pages of each story at the same time and read the two stories together comparing and contrasting what you can see and what you understand.

The images are created in Baker’s normal style, collage, and are packed full of detail that takes a while to observe fully.  The stories do cross when the Moroccan father travels into the market to sell a carpet and then the carpet is collected and placed in the Sydney home.  A way, I suppose, of asking us to consider where the things we buy come from and that we are linked in all sorts of ways.  It would be a great discussion with children to consider all the different ways that the title Mirror is reflected in the book.

There are several websites with teaching ideas for using this book.  Walker Books has a set of activities which are worth dipping into, particularly as they were drawn up with Jeannie Baker.  I would use the book to retell one of the stories but I would ask children to tell it in the style of The Day of Ahmed’s  Secret by Florence Perry Heide and Judith Heide Gillilan.  The writing in this book is rich with description and quite lyrical.  Whenever I have used this book with children they are always really surprised by the secret, it being such an every day act in their own lives.

Working with some teachers last week, we started to explore the power of wordless picture books and how they can support children’s writing.  Here are some of the reasons that we came up with about why we should be using them:

• they allow children to tell their own story based upon their own understanding of the images
• the allow children to control a whole story thereby embedding story structure
• they allow us the opportunity to teach the aspects of writing that children need to get better at in a controlled context, e.g use of speech, figurative language etc
• they allow us to teach visual literacy skills and the ways in which they can enhance writing
• they allow children to orchestrate a greater degree of complexity in character, setting, plot, conflict and theme
• they develop speaking and listening skills

So why aren’t we using more of them?

Over the next few weeks I will be reviewing wordless picture books that will appear on our texts that teach list.

The first one I want to look at is Shadow by Suzy Lee.

This is an incredible book telling the story of a little girl in a garage who switches on the light and starts to make and play with the shadows.  The shadows become more and more fantastical showing a rich imaginary world.  There are only two colours used in the book, black and yellow, the yellow becoming more predominant as the shadows move further into the realms of fantasy.

What I really love is the way in whcih the book is designed with the little girl on one side of the double page spread and the shadows on the other, meeting at the centre of the book so if you hold up one of the pages it really does look like shadows on a wall.  The fold represents the line between reality and fantasy.  There are similar themes in her book Mirror.  Click on the link to the slide show to see what they are.

I can think of several ways of telling the story in this book.  The first way that springs to mind is the way in which Rosie’s Walk is told.  Sparse text telling the reality of the story but that leaves out all the interesting fantasy elements so I think I would like to retell it in the style of Think of an Eel by Karen Wallace and Mike Bostock which is a text with a dual voice.  One text told in straight forward report style and the other told in rich, alliterative language.  I think they would work well with Shadows.

What are your favourite wordless picture books?

We have been leading a lot of phonics work recently; training, supporting, demonstrating, working alongside and using the lesson study model of support with much more to come this term.  One of the ideas that we are very clear about in phonics teaching is that you need a small number of  games/activities which you and the children really enjoy.  This means that the focus of the session can remain on the phonics skills and knowledge rather than learning to play a game.  So here are our top 10 phonics activities not listed in any particular order:

The B refers to an activity for blending and the S for segmenting.  The page numbers refer to the description of the activity in Letters and Sounds.

Which activities do you think are high value in terms of phonics learning?

We quite often visit Lyme Regis for a walk and a meander through the town stopping of course for a cup of tea and usually a cake.  The landscaped gardens above the beach are one of my favourite places.  This part of the coastline is fossil heaven and so there are lots of places to see fossils that have been discovered in the area.  There are several children’s books based on Mary Anning and fossil hunting,  my favourite being Stone Girl Bone Girl  by Laurence Anholt.

But Lyme Regis is also one of those rare places nowadays that has an independent book shop and you know what that means!  Today’s visit was no exception.  I bought a wonderful little fold-up book of the skyline of London illustrated by Sarah McMenemy produced by Walker Books.

The book folds out to show the outline of the London skyline with text for each building that stretches into the sky.  And because you never stop being a teacher, I thought that this would make a wonderful model for children to create their own version about the local environment or any environment that children are looking at.  Anyone familiar with Paul Johnson’s work will be familiar with making folded paper books like this. I am very taken with the boat in the last picture on his site.

It would also be a great way to present the outcome of an author study by producing a book of the characters in the author’s book or settings or anything else that is a theme in the writing.  The book has two different types of pop-up so it wouldn’t be too difficult to show children how to make them.  You can also make the little box that the book fits in.

It is a long time since I last made a folded paper book so I am off to have a go.  Here’s hoping that you are inspired to try something new/old/different this holiday.  Happy Christmas everyone.  See you in the New Year.

I have long enjoyed Carol Ann Duffy’s work, a fact which was brought home to me when I read her  poem Achillles about David Beckham.  I loved the way that she brought popular culture and laureate work together.  Something she has continued to do.  I hope that I am to receive her latest book The Bees for christmas.  I have dropped enough hints!

What I do have however, is copies of the little christmas books that she has written and I have collected over the last three years.

The first of the trio that I bought was Mrs Scrooge.  This is an uptodate version of the story with Mrs Scrooge googling information about the way that turkeys are reared for the christmas feast.  It also contains credit cards, protests and developers.

Up the echoing stairs to slippers, simple supper, candles, cocoa, cat, went Mrs Scrooge: not scared, but oddly comforted at glimpsing Scrooge’s knockered face.

The language rolls and trips off the tongue, rich with alliteration and assonance.  Christmas past, present and future arrive to show Mrs Scrooge the life she has had, has and will have with a happy ending of family near by and developers thwarted.

Posy Simmonds provides the illustrations and they mirror the warmth, detail and emotion.

Another Night Before Christmas is illustrated by Rob Ryan: he of the wonderful paper cutting.   This is the story of a little girl trying to stay awake to see if Santa is real.

The hushed street was in darkness.  Snow duveted the cars – a stray cat had embroidered each roof with its paws.

An owl on an aerial had planets for eyes.  The child at the window stared up at the sky.

I an not quite sure how you pronounce ‘duveted’ but I do love the way that christmas is described; the flirting of the tree in flickers of green and crimson, the reindeer whose breath chiffoned out into the cold and the aeroplanes that sped to the east and the west like a pulled cracker. There are again references to contemporary life with the droning motorways, people in blankets with nowhere to go, cashpoints glowing like icons of light and the satellite filming famine and greed.  The story is however timeless.

The Christmas Truce tells the story of the football match on the 25th December 1914 when war was suspended and Christmas spread.

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist, to open itself and offer the day like a gift for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz….. with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs.

The illustrations by David Roberts are so evocative showing a  devastated waste land of spiky shapes and  red cold noses and cheeks.

These books would make fantastic stocking filler.  Let’s hope there will be many more.

Happy Christmas!

Spelling is just one of those things – it seems so hard to get it right and to have an effect upon children’s writing but often  that is because we need to have all three of the following things in place in order to make a difference.

1. Teach – choose a spelling programme that has progression and suggests activities and ways of working.  Make sure that is pays sufficient attention to strategies for learning and remembering words, and if it doesn’t add them in.  Make sure it focuses on patterns in our words rather than learning lists of words.  Model being interested in words, investigating why things are spelt the way they are so that children understand that there is a reason for our spelling.  Assess what children  are learning about spelling patterns and how they articulate what they know. This does notnecessarily mean setting a list of words to take home and learn.
2. Apply – model for children what they should do with spelling at the point of writing.  Children need to take the responsibility for this.  So show them how to use a have-a-go sheet, trying out different spellings for the words until they can get as near to a spelling as possible.  Use that spelling and draw a line underneath it in their writing to show that they need to come back to that word and work on it a bit further.  At no point in this process should children  ask you as the teacher if it is right.  Model using a have-a-go sheet whenever you write and across the curriculum.  Model using a wide range of strategies to get to the correct spelling (analogy, letter string patterns, linking it to other words that have similar meaning or come from the same family, mnemonics used etc).  Give children time to try and find the correct spellings of these words after writing and then if they can’t, and only then, help them.  Give children time to learn these spellings and if parents insist, send these words home to be learnt.  Teach children how to work in pairs to test each other.
3. Assess – how are children spelling in their writing?  What words are they struggling with and therefore what patterns should be included in your teaching.  How is what they are doing now progress?

Today we met with the schools who are part of a project looking at how we can support children who receive free school meals to reduce the gap between their attainment and the attainment of all children. The main areas identified by research  are quality first teaching, and most of our schools looking at this are focusing on guided work, engaging pupils and parents through pupil conferencing, blogging and home/school learning.

We wanted to show that blogging did not need to be about writing and so used Audioboo to capture a flavour of the discussions that groups held, sharing their work so far.  It is however filtered in schools so Vocaroo would be a good alternative.

Many thanks to all who took part.

What do you use to upload sound files quickly to a blog or website?

I just loved Brain Selznick’s latest book Wonderstruck.  I love the way the text and the images tell two stories that cross, link and move backwards and forwards through time until finally coming together.

I love the way the images start by zooming into the wolf’s eye and out again when we see Lillian May, the actress.  Very filmic, which of course is so true of Selznick’s work.

I hate the way that the girl, Rose,  has to reach out to her mother the actress Lillian May and the way in which she rejects her.  The facial expressions tell the story of a mother who does not want to be reminded of anything less than perfect in her life.  The end of silent movies here reflects the end of the mother and daugheter’s relationship.  It can’t be a coincidence that Rose, the daughter who is deaf, has her story told through images rather than words.

This is definitely a book for guided reading – so much to discus and puzzle over.  One for children reading securely in NC level 4.

And to top it all I see the The Invention of Hugo Cabret has been made into a film which is due out in November (in America).

Other books that would be suitable for guided reading can be seen here and here.

Angela and I have been planning a spelling course today.  I always think of spelling as a bit of a Pandora’s box.  Once you have lifted that lid, it is almost impossible to close it again and all that is left is hope!.

Every teacher has their own favourite games, activities and ideas and I am no different.  I have several activities that I use over and over again, adapting them to fit the children/adults that I am working with.

The first one is most useful with Yrs 3/4 and is based around suffixes and prefixes.  This idea comes from Melvyn Ramsden and is a simple grid that allows children to add suffixes and prefixes to root words.  From the grid, they can read and write a whole list of words that, if you can spell the affixes, are available to you.  It reminds me of ‘facts for free’ in maths.

Image from http://web.mac.com/peterbowers1/Site_38_Visitors/Melvyn_Ramsden.html

I love these grids – I get children to read them, write them and create their own.  If you can spell sign, how many other words can you spell?  I am at present investigating signet and cygnet.  I know that a signet was used instead of a signature so belongs to that family of words but I am not sure about cygnet.  Try to create a grid around <velop>.

Another of my favourite activities is to create a word web, one that links words to each other.  Start with develop and move out from that: what other words have the prefix de- and what other words have velop in them.  You may end up with envelope and from this, enveloping, enveloped, envelops.  My dictionary tells me that the prefix en- means inside.  This would then lead me off on the trail of encapsulate etc.

This curiosity about words is an essential part of the ethos of a spelling classroom and is obviously not something that can be represented in a spelling programme but miss it out at your peril.

My third favourite spelling activity is the use of a have-a-go sheet.  These are used to support children at the point of writing.  Every day, whenever you write across the curriculum, pretend that you can’t spell a word.  Move over to your have-a-go sheet and try out various spellings until you can get the one that is most like the correct spelling to you.  Use that in your writing and if you are still not sure about it draw a line under the word.  This signifies that you know you need to come back to it and work on it a bit more.  This way of working means that children take the responsibility for spelling words, do not follow you around saying ‘how do you spell…’ and generally get on with writing.  It doesn’t slow them down and there is no need to ‘think enormous and write big’ as Pie Corbett would say.  You need to model a range of strategies at this point, some of them being:

• sounding out and using phonic knowledge to represent every sound that you can hear
• analogy – likening with other letter strings that you know, e.g. light, fright
• use of patterns of meaning and families, e.g. medic, medicine, medical
• clapping out the syllables and then recording something for every syllable
• visual patterns including ‘does it look right?’
• mnemonics (for a very few words that you continually mis-spell)

Ahh!  The joys of spelling.  What are your favourite activities?