Literacy Resources

We have been talking with teachers recently about teaching children how to make meaning from texts, often because there are children in the class who are finding it more challenging to infer when reading. Good readers use a range of strategies and we need to model a wide range  such as activiating prior knowledge, generating [...]

A big thank you to @mjorgenson for sharing this resource .  dafont is a website with thousands of different fonts.  Fantastic.  They help to make the writing suit the context. If you are using the book Leon and the Place Between you may want to try the western fonts. (Scroll down the page to see [...]

Everything comes from something else; nothing comes from nothing. Anthony Browne, Children’s Laureate in Books for Keeps January 2010 Inventing texts is a way of showing children how to bring together everything that they know about writing to create something of their own. I have been doing a lot of work recently on plastic carrier [...]

I have written several times about Found Poetry. It is a talk for writing activity that allows children to magpie words and phrases from great writers and roll the language over their tongues so that its’ patterns become internalised. It also allows children to combine words in different ways.  This is a high value activity. [...]

This can sometimes be the genre that is the most difficult for us to find examples of to use with children.  That tells us something.  It tells us that in ‘real life’ you don’t find explanations on their own.  They are ususally part of another text such as a report and therefore make a hybrid [...]

As part of our Talk for Writing training we have been focusing on non-fiction using the wonderful book Think of an Eel by Karen Wallace and Mike Bostock.  The two voices in this book are very different; one a literary non-fiction with the most poetic language possible and the other a more formal report tone [...]

This is an amazing book that I was introduced to via @Joga5 a few weeks ago. It is a rags to riches story of a young boy, Hugo who lives in a french train station and is building an automaton.  How he came to be living where he does, have an automaton and generally survive [...]