Literacy Resources

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 here and 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 website there 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.

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?

Related posts:  Comics

This has to be one of the best resources that I have come across recently. Many thanks to Tim Brook for sharing on his blog Magic Lantern Movies.   A widget that allows others to upload film clips and then remix all the clips.  This would be a great activity for pupils to do over the holidays, bearing in mind e-safety issues.  Instead of writing the ever present ‘What I did in the Summer Holidays’ on the first day back, the class could make a video of what they did. Let’s have a go!  Upload a short video clip of somewhere that you visited or have visited previously during the summer and then edit and remix the clips. Want one of these yourself?  Then go to Kaltura Open Source Video and sign up. Linked posts: What else can I have on my blog?

Many thanks to Redbridge Primary ICT for sharing the resource WordSift.  WordSift takes a text or section of a text and displays a word cloud that shows the frequency of the words, whether they appear in 570 most frequently used academic words and displays them alphabetically.

This wordsift is taken from a text about Roman agriculture.

Once it has sorted the words it then offers two methods of obtaining meaning from these words: images and a visual thesaurus.

If I didn’t know what crop meant then I would have to work quite hard to understand it from these sources.  The site offers contextual support by highlighting all the sentences with that word in so that you can go back and check whether it would make sense. The programme obviously takes plurals and makes them singular.  I had typed in crops on all occasions but it showed up as crop on the sift.  If it had stayed as crops the image search might have been more relevant.  As the programme is in beta form this may be rectified later on in its development.

I wondered what the outcome of a fiction text would be so put in the first part of Beauty and the Beast by Gerladine McCaughrean.  None of the words were repeated so they all came out the same size and none were on the academic word list, unsurprisingly.

I really like the idea behind this mashup and think it has great potential for working with non-fiction texts, speeches in particular. What came over to me in the non-fiction text was the importance of villas in Roman agriculture and that was reflected in the original text.

The programme allows you to paste text into the sort box, I typed mine in.  Teachers would need to check out all texts in WordSift before using this tool in order that no inappropriate images are shown.

Activities that it could be used for are things like predictive work such as devising a title for the text, or comprehension activities showing children how to work out the meaning of new words linking back to the context.  It would also provide support for children learning English.

I am having a challenging time trying to work my way through Myst III Exile and it reminds me about how struggling readers must feel.  In the real world I am famous for my lack of sense of direction, which coupled with my problems with left and right are really leaving me struggling in the virtual world.

I have never played a computer game before so I don’t know how these texts work.  This is exactly how a beginning or struggling reader must feel.   When asked to wait in Atrus’ study, I literally waited for him to turn up.  It never dawned on me to look around and look at the papers on his desk. So behaviours that are considered appropriate in real life are not necessarily so in the virutal world.  Trial and error with the text has shown me that there are some ways of behaving with it that I need to use.  I now click on everything.  A little hit and miss but nevertheless better than just standing there.  This is a bit like readers navigating their way around a  text.  How does it work?  How do you get to what you want?  What do you want?

The second thing I am struggling with is picking up on the cues.  There are certain patterns, objects or puzzles that you must go in search of and I didn’t know that you needed to notice them let alone make notes and jottings about them.  This meant that I needed to go back a lot and try again with more information.  As a reader, I rarely reread books – even my most favourite ones.  This going back and having another go is particularly trying.  James Paul Gee in his book What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, refers to this as ‘pleasurable frustration’.  To me it is just frustrating!  This must be how readers feel when asked to infer or read between the lines.  What cues do they use to pick up on meanings that are not literal?  When do these cues link?

All of this reminds me of the necessity for guided work.  Here the teacher guides the group to a deeper shared meaning of the text.  Members of the group listen and learn from one another, return to important parts of the text together and problem solve.

What I wouldn’t give for a more experienced reader of games and some others at roughly the same level of game playing to be sitting alongside me now helping me through this text.

Image Penang Hill by nicholaschan

I was recently asked by @JeanetteMcLeod  what I thought about ebooks in the classroom and why  they weren’t being used.  A good question.

I think that there are several situations where e-books could be used in literacy: shared reading, guided reading and  independent reading; and across the curriculum for research.

We call books that are used in shared time in literacy Texts that Teach and they are used as models for children.  They are texts that have one or more of the following criteria: have powerful language, have something worth talking about and have a strong structure.  I have to say that of the ebooks I have seen there are none that fit into this category.  I would want to use ebooks in this part of a literacy session because I could show them through a data projector and everyone would be able to see the book clearly.

Children who are reading at level 3 and above (National Curriculum levels in the UK) could use ebooks for guided reading if the school has access to suitable hardware for the books to be read on.  Again, these books must be quality literature or non-fiction that are just good books no matter what format they are in and must include picture books not just novels.  For children reading below level 3 publishers of ebooks would have to get the book ‘Book Banded’ so that schools/teachers would know what level the book could be used at.  At these levels, for teaching purposes, children should not be problem-solving with more than 1 word in 10.  I suspect that we are years away from seeing this happen.  I have seen some phonically decodeable books in ebook format and as long as these were linked to phases in Letters and Sounds (phonics programme) they would be used by schools. Phonically decoadable books are however a very small percentage of books used in schools.

I think the biggest place for ebooks at the moment is in independent reading where things such as text to speech can be a great support.  But again here we need more than traditional tales and books that are out of copyright.  We need up to date quality texts that we would want to read no matter what format they are in.

I think that the move towards ebooks for the  reading curriculum has just started but we are long way away from ebooks being used regularly.

Do you have an ebook that you use with your class that is a quality text?  If so, I would love to know what it is.

People often ask us for recommendations for books to use for guided reading so here is my top 100 list. This is a personal list and may well not contain your favourites.  Please add yours by leaving a comment.  The levels come from my experience of using the books with children and talking to teachers – you may feel differently about them.  Please let us know.

Level 3

1. Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett
2. The Jolly Postman by the Ahlbergs
3. I am the Mummy Heb-Nefert by Christina Bunting
4. I is for India by Prodeepta Das (non-fiction)
5. P is for Pakistan by Shazia Razzak and Prodeepta Das (non-fiction)
6. Traction Man is Here by Mini Grey
7. The Big Red Trouble by Carmen Harris
8. Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross
9. Little Wolf’s Postbag by Ian Whybrow
10. Mind Your Own Business by Michael Rosen (poetry)
11. Amazon Diary: The Jungle Adventures of Alex Winters
12. Shortcut by David Macaulay
13. The Tunnel by Anthony Browne
14. Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne
15. Fair’s Fair by Leon Garfield
16. Diary of a Killer Cat by Anne Fine
17. Thomas and the Tinners by Jill Paton Walsh
18. Who’s Been Sleeping in my Porridge by Colin McNaughton

Level 4

1. Seasons Songs by Ted Hughes (poetry)
2. Beowulf by Kevin Crossley-Holland
3. Beauty and the Beast by Geraldine McCaughrean
4. Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocento
5. Way Home by Libby Hathorne and Gregory rogers
6. Black and White by David Macaulay
7. The Paradise Garden by Colin Thompson
8. Anno’s Aesop by Mitsuma Anno
9. Until I met Dudley: How everyday things really work by Roger McGough and Chris Riddell
10. Outsiders by Kevin Crossley-Holland
11. Watertower by Gary Crew
12. Prowlpuss by Gina Wilson
13. The Highway Man by Alfred Noyes and Charles Keeping
14. Crack Another Yolk by John Foster (poetry)
15. Great Estimations by Bruce Goldstein (non-fiction)
16. Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
17. the Owl Tree by Jenny Nimmo
18. The Fib and Other Stories by George Layton
19. Secret Freinds by Elizabeth Laird
20. Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo
21. George – Don’t Do That by Joyce Grenfell
22. Varjak Paw by SF Said
23. Heard it in the Playground by Allan Ahlberg (poetry)
24. Wicked World by Benjamin Zephiniah (poetry)
25. Blue John by Berlie Doherty
26. The 18th Emergency by Betsy Byars
27. Blabbermouth by Morris Gleitzman
28. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Selina Hastings
29. The Knight and the Loathly Lady by Selina Hastings
30. Iron Man by Ted Hughes
31. Eye of the Wolf by Baniel Pennac
32. Mufarao’s Beautiful Daughters by Johhn Steptoe

Level 5

1. Clockwork by Philip Pullman
2. Zinder Zunder by Philip Ridley
3. Safe From Harm by Rollo Armstrong
4. Beware Beware by Susan Hill
5. The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan
6. Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection selected by Michael Rosen
7. What is the Truth? by Ted Hughes
8. The Cantebury Tales retold by Geraldine McCaughrean
9. Holes by Louis Sacher
10. Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman
11. Skellig by David Almond
12. The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis (I’ve put it here for children to really understand this book)

Part of the emjoyment for me of being a blogger is starting a discussion or train of thought that others will join in with and help extend your thinking. In order for this to happen, blogs need readers so day 10 of 20 days to better blogging with children is about establishing a community of readers who join in the discussions that children are starting when blogging.

In fact schools are a ready community of readers.  There are the pupils in the class, pupils in other classes and other adults that work in the school.  The only thing that needs to happen here is for time to be built in to allow for reading and commenting.  Many schools have taken guided reading out of the literacy lesson.  Whilst the teacher is working with a group the rest of the class are ususally engaged with reading activities.  Perhaps reading and commenting on blogs by pupils in the school could be one of these activities.

But what about a wider community?  Could parents have access to the blogs and also be commenting?  And what about making links with other schools?  There are several places where you can look to find schools to link with.  The Edublogs site has edublog supporters promoted on the front page and it might be possible to find a school to link with here.  The British Council’s Global Gateway is another way to find schools to link with.

How far does your reading community stretch?

A wonderful trailer for use in literacy.  How soon before you know whether the thing carrying him is friendly or not?  What are the clues?  What effect does looking up at the tree canopy give?  How would you describe that opening in writing?  From whose point of vew?

Children could capture an image of the text and put it into Photostory or MovieMaker and add their own images to show what they hope for, fear, consider to be an adventure  and how they are a wild thing.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and Safe From Harm by Rollo Armstrong make a great pair of books to use in guided reading to compare and contrast.

Read this post to find out how to download from YouTube to take a film into the classroom.

Engaging The Eye Generation by Johanna Riddle is a wonderful example of a teacher sharing how she integrates literacy with visual or media literacy in her classroom.  What is also fantastic is that the publishers have created an online edition of the book for us all to read.

In the book, Johanna shares with us how she teaches media work linked to literacy teaching.  Her ideas start with books shared with children and she then allows them to develop their responses to the texts through the use of images and various tools to manipulate the images.  The book details examples of children’s work and their thinking behind it. (For teachers in the UK this type of work would provide wonderful evidence for Assessing Pupil Progress in reading.)

In an interview for her blog tour , Johanna talks about how she had limited technical skills when she started this work.  This must be a familiar feeling for many teachers.  She also describes how she overcame this by starting off with one tool and learnt about that tool alongside the children. When confident with that one she moved on to use others and extended her repertoire.  This is an excellent model for CPD when embedding ICT in literacy.  To know one tool and to be able to use it in depth is much more powerful that knowing six and using them all in a superficial manner.

This is an engaging read that combines the learning journey not just of the children but also the teacher.