Literacy Resources

I talked to a teacher on Wednesday who had been on Talk for Writing training and had read our thoughts about blueprints.  She wanted to know how she could start to introduce the idea of blueprints to the whole school and embed Talk for Writing training with only one staff meeting to do so.  We came up with lots of ideas that she couldn’t do and eventually hit upon the idea of taking one blueprint and using it across the whole school.  So the one staff meeting could focus upon a blueprint and talk for writing ideas for using it in reading and writing.

We agreed that not only would it be one blueprint but the whole school would focus on one main story – Little Red Riding Hood, an overcoming the monster blueprint.  There are lots of versions of Little Red Riding Hood and there are lots of innovations on this story – telling it from the wolf’s point of view, adding other characters and adding other subversive elements.  It will be interesting to see if any of these books use a different blueprint because of the way they are retold.

So, here is my list of books/films/websites based around Little Red Riding Hood that are suitable for primary age children.  I haven ‘t really gone for any of the traditional tales as schools will already have these.

1. Hoodwinked – the movie with lots of intertextual links and most primary aged children will have already seen it.
2. Little Red: A Fizzingly Good Yarn- by Lynn and David Roberts
3. Lucy and the Big Bad Wolf by Ann Jungman
4. Lucy and the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing by Ann Jungman
5. Lon Po Po by Ed Young – a chinese  Little Red Riding Hood
6. Pretty Salma by Niki Daly – a south african Little Red Riding Hood
7. Flossie & the Fox by Patricia C MckIssack
8. The Wolf’s Story by Toby Forward
9. Little Red Riding Hood: A Newfangled Prairie Tale by Lisa Campbell Forist
10. Beware Beware by Susan Hill – more poetry than prose
11. Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl with the immortal lines ‘one eyelid flickers, she whips a pistol from her knickers’
12. Wolf by Gillian Cross – only suitable for Yr6+
13. The Little Red Riding Hood Project – versions of the story with images
14. Visualising Little Red, a paper by Sarah Bonner about the images used in modern retellings of Little Red Riding hood
15. Added on the 04/01/10 Little Fred Riding Hood by Michael Cox
16. Little Red Riding Hood retold by Tony Ross
17. Beware of Boys by Tony Blundell
18. Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf by Catherine Storr
19. Little Red Riding Hood by Anne Walter
20. Red Riding Hood Rap by Penny Dolan

These books can be used in shared time and a great guided reading session would be for each child to take one of the titles and discuss how the books are the same and different.  I look forward to seeing what they do.

If you know of any other stories based around Little Red Riding Hood please leave a comment.

This has to be one of the best titles for a long time!  A drove of bullocks by PatrickGeorge is the most beautifully designed non-fiction text around collective nouns.

I love an implausibility of gnus or a loveliness of ladybirds.  Each double page spread illustrates the collective noun in a very clever, minimalist way with additional text explaining something about the animal.

This would be a great text for everyone to use in a literacy classroom but for those of you grappling with Talk for Writing this text would be superb.  It would allow for a great deal of word play in devising collective nouns and the small amounts of text are a suitable amount for Yr2 or Yr3 pupils to use as a model for writing.  The vocabulary choice is driven by the collective noun, e.g. for a business of ferrets we have active sleuth, snoop, getting down to business, attention span and repetitive rewards.  Very appropriate!

There are many sites that play with collective nouns, here, here, here and here.

It would be great if a class made their own version of this book for people or objects in a classroom.  The design aspect of each page would be very important.

What is your favourite collective noun?  What would a collective noun be for bloggers – a boast of bloggers?  Let me know.

What a lot Rebecca and I  learned today and we were leading the course!  We had been inspired by Christopher Booker’s
Seven Basic Plots for some time but it was the first time that we had a chance to share it with teachers.

So what did we learn?

In order for children to work with blueprints there are some ways of working that need to be in place and they are

• Book talk to allow children to respond personally to a text.  If you keep going for long enough and value all responses so much more comes out than you might expect
• Comparing and contrasting texts which can be simply achieved by asking the question – have you come across anything else like this?  This opens up the discussion for the links that children might make.
• Sharing other texts that are like the particular blueprint that you are using which will allow you to collect and categorise.  This helps to show children that blueprints are common patterns regardless of genre and culture.

In writing we found the blueprints helped children to invent stories.  We started the inventing session as in this post but  once people had decided what their characters were we asked them to attach what they had developed so far to a blueprint.  We all had the same characters a woman who was selling shark burgers on the beach and a shark who wanted this to stop (don’t ask how we came up with this). People chose either the quest, tragedy or rags to riches and briefly worked out what would happen at each stage of the story.

1. The shark (sharky) saw the shark burgers being sold and decides he wants to stop it.
2. He sets off to do this by rounding up all the other sharks and convincing them to follow him to a safe place so they set off.
3. Things start to go wrong.  It’s hard to find a safe place and shark burgers have become a world wide favourite and everyone wants them.
4. Shark hunting becomes a necessity to feed this hunger and because the sharks are all in one place they are easy to kill
5. Sharky and all of the other sharks are hunted to extinction

In fact I have paraphrased this last part.  What was actually said (and please remember this was teachers)  ‘They were all killed and the sea turned red with their blood’.   So, what sort of blueprint do you think this group followed?

This is an oral activity.  Once the story is agreed it is very easy to map it.

What this type of activity helped us to see is that very often when children  invent their own text they frequently start off with a character and something happening to them but find it very difficult to work this through to a resolution.  By starting with anchoring in a blueprint we can now begin to layer up with detail.  We can think about how we want our readers to feel at each point of the story, we can think about how we reveal character through out the story, we can add clues as to what is going to happen because we are clear about the whole story, we can add a motif to run through the story, we can decide where the cliff hangers and hooks need to be.  And we can start to elaborate at each point to our retelling.

One of the things that teachers wanted in order to continue their thinking about this was a place where they could start to collect books and their blueprints so I have set up two places.  I am slowly writing posts that exemplify each blueprint and you can leave a comment sharing the title and author.  Or you can go to our website and fill in a very simple form that will collate suggestions.

I have now been blogging for 13 months – I forgot the blog birthday.  Strange how online life mirrors real life ; ) I thought for the end of 2009 I would pick out 10 things that I discovered and that have become a part of me, some of which I have blogged about and some not.  When I say I discovered it is of course thanks to all the people in my PLN that discovered them for me!

1. Talk for writing and here – this is a strange one but it is a way of teaching writing that helps children to embed language patterns and use them in their own writing.  I have worked with a lot of teachers and quite a few children in my eight years of being a literacy consultant and this is the one idea that has had the most impact on children and their writing. The other reason that I like it so much is that it is based on skills and processes that writers use and is not a mechanistic attempt to simplify writing for teachers or children.   I am looking forward to seeing how it develops amongst our team and with teachers and children in 2010.

2. There will be several books in this list but one of my favourites that has had a lot of use towards the end of the year and will do so next year is Think of an Eel .  This is a non-fiction text told through two voices; one which I would call a literary non-fiction voice and one which is a more formal report voice. Word order and choice is poetic, sentence construction is varied and paced to fit the life cycle of an eel and the illustrations are watery and also reflect the sentences and life cycle.  This is definitely a text that teaches.

3. 2009 introduced me to etherpad which then disappeared.  It enabled groups of people to write together synchronously or asynchronously and was so usable in the classroom.  It has been  reborn in several  forms of which I use two, Netherpad (which wouldn’t open when I wrote this post so I hope it hasn’t disappeared as well) and PiratePad.

4. Comic creators – the boys writing project that we have run this year has meant that I have had to move into areas of reading and writing where I am not very experienced.  Comics.   The best software to create comics is Comic Life because you can use your own images.  However, if you can’t afford to buy software (and this doesn’t cost much) then the following are great; Super Action Comic Hero , Dr Who Comic Maker , Read Write Think comic creator and Captain Underpants .  Plenty to choose from.

5. One book which has influenced my thinking about how we teach the reading and writing of fiction is The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. I am fascinated by the underlying patterns of story and now when I read can’t help but try and decide which of his seven plots are used.  They help children to see the generic patterns behind story whether in print or as images and can be used in their own writing.  I am not the only one interested in this.

6. I have found diigo to be an invaluable way of reading and commenting on texts online, particularly when doing this as part of a group study.  I have to say that it went beyond my expectations.

7. Storybook creators – I love these sites that allow children to create their own books.  They range from those that allow a lot of choices to those that don’t but all offer something to young writers.  Some of my favourites are; Picture Book Maker, Spot the Dog and Storybird (this is my all time favourite but is blocked by our filters even on my computer – lucky you if you can get it).

8. My Flip Video Camcorder .  More and more schools are getting these as easy to use video cameras to have available in the classroom.  They should be there for children to use a a tool to record learning just as pens and pencils are.  I bought one because I found some of the other cameras in classrooms limiting.  I use it all the time.  It comes with editing software but I prefer to download the film and use MovieMaker to edit.  Very easy to use.

9. The power of animation to allow children to show their understanding of texts.  This is partly due to the project, Persistence of Vision, that we are involved in.  We are particularly focused on the links between animation and poetry. Our outcomes are to try and record what we think progression in animation looks like in primary schools and to develop a professional development package that can be used byanyone interested in taking animation further.  We are working with Oscar Stringer and using I Can Animate software and the powerful yet affordable Hue webcams as our equipment.  I have to own up to having a bright pink Hue webcam.

10.  and finally to all the people that I am connected to through twitter, blogging, LinkedIn,Facebook and online learning a big thank you for all your ideas and resources that you have shared.  It is because of you that I can write a post like this.

Happy New Year.

We talk a lot about working walls and model them on our talk for writing training so it is fantastic to get some feedback from teachers about what they are doing in their classrooms.

A working wall is a temporary display for any or all curriculum areas that shows the build up or progress towards an outcome. It is not a neatly presented, double-backed display but an ‘in the moment’ display captured whilst working, that becomes a scaffold for children and an explicit visual support of the journey. In literacy, by the time the children get to the writing stage there will be many supports for the writing on the working wall and teachers will be modelling how to use the ideas and practises that have been generated.

I particularly like this series of images because they show so clearly the place of talk for writing in the teaching sequence.  Can you spot the story-mapping, warming up the word and the support from visual images?  They also take the children through the stages of imitation and innovation.  So many children need to linger longer in the imitation phase in order that they embed the language patterns and start to find their own voices.  Children will then naturally move into the innovate and finally invent phases.

When talking about book displays in  The Reading Environment, Aiden Chambers states

they deeply influence the mental set of the people who see them.

I see no reason why working walls should have any less of an influence.

Our thanks go to Mark Cole at West Croft Juniors for these wonderful pictures of his working walls linked to talk for writing. It would behard hard not to succeed at writing in this classroom.

Which aspects of talk for writing have had the most impact upon your children’s writing?

I am a big fan of found poetry and have suggested it as an activity several times on this blog.  On Wednesday I read Andrew Motion’s recent found poem An Equal Voice created from a variety of sources.

Found poetry allows us to magpie (I know it’s not really a verb!) words and phrases from other writers and to put them together in our own ways (usual words in unusual combinations).  It is a very supportive way of creating powerful poetry with children whose own vocabulary might be limited.  It allows them to roll the language over their tongues to see how it fits and eventually, if it is  said and read enough, the words and phrases become their own.

Found poetry can be created from fiction and non-fiction texts equally well and can be derived from one source or across a range of sources and can therefore be cross-curricular.  They can be created from speeches, letters, scientific and research papers, road signs, adverts, websites and picture books.  In fact anything that has words can be used.

Here’s a found poem derived from this post.

Lost and Found

Magpie.

Rolling the language

To see how it fits.

Words and tongues

Creating a voice.

Poetry.

So how would you go about creating found poetry with children?  One of the easiest ways to start is with a text that you are using  somewhere in the curriculum.  Allow the children to collect, on post-its or whiteboards, words and phrases that they like or think have an impact.  Pool these so that there is a large bank which could be displayed on the working wall.  Model  selecting some of the post-its and trying them out in different combinations seeing which work and which don’t.  Read them aloud.  Take some out and add more in until you have something to share.  Other ideas are to:-

• photocopy part of a text and allow children to highlight text that they want on it.  Cut this out and rearrange.
• give children different texts based on a theme to collect words and phrases from and then pool them to create with.
• set up a display of words and phrases that children can create poems with.  Record each of the poems created and explore the similarities and differences.
• the recording of the poems could be by photograph.  Take a look at the Flickr Found Poetry group.
• How about Haiku from error messages?
• And why not have a blog of found poetry?  Find the poems by clicking on the categories.

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.

How have you approached inventing sessions?

Linked posts: Talk for Writing – Inventing Texts

One of the mantra’s that schools are using nowadays is Pie Corbett’s imitate, innovate and invent.  As a literacy team we have spent a long time sharing with others what imitate and innovate mean in terms of writing but have not focused on the invention aspect in any detail.  However, without frequent inventing sessions we are in danger of missing out on a key aspect of talk for writing.

Inventing is where children start to make up stories for themselves, drawing on their bank of told stories as well as their lives and needs to start as soon as children enter school.  These inventing sessions should be oral, guided by the teacher, recycling story language and an opportunity to draw on a range of stories and life.  Pie talks about this is terms of story but in fact children can undertake exactly the same type of acitivity with non-fiction.  Many children will need some props to support their oral retelling and there are a vast range of ideas available.  Here are some of our favourites:

• mind-mapping what children know about stories in terms of characters, settings, problem, resolution, ending, story language or language features and themes.  Children then use the mind-map as a bank and draw out something from each section and then put them together as a story.  This could also be done for the content for any type of non-fiction writing.
• If you want to invent a myth or legend then the storycards in the Further Literacy Support (FLS) box are particularly good for this.  If you have lost yours get an A4 colour or black and white set here
• Interesting props that you have collected which could be anything from a magic key to a unicorn to a special pot.
• Flickr have a great group called Tell a Story in Five Frames for Kids which is sets of 5 pictures telling a story.  Some of these could be a really useful prop to story telling.  Some could even be used for non-fiction texts such as a newspaper report or a recount.  In fact why not take your own 5 frames to tell a story.
• Start with one of the seven basic plots for storytelling.
• For yrs 5 and 6 try one of these statements as a stimulus for storytelling from Adam Maxwell.  I also like the idea of this site.  Hover over a number and see if you can orally tell what it says.
• tell the story of the graph.  This is a familiar science activity but can also be used for story.  There are several graph drawing programmes but a piece of paper is probably the best technology for this activity. 

As children become more familiar with the idea of inventing sessions they will start to draw more and more on what they already know and have experienced.  Our role as teachers is to support children to tell in detail using the language that is appropriate to that type of text.

I am constantly amazed at the tools that are on the web and the fact that there are so many people out there willing to share them.  I found Thriller Whizz on Mark Warner’s wonderful site that includes Ideas to Inspire.  This one was on  Inspire Writing.

Thriller Whizz is designed to generate titles for thriller novels.  However, there are other uses that it can be put to.  To work the generator drag the words that you want onto the lines and press whizz.   A discussion about word classes would be interesting.  Are they all nouns?  What about when used individually and in combination?

If you are familiar with the Talk for Writing activity usual words in unusual combinations (watch the video) then you will find that this little programme can be used in the same way.  For instance I used just word A and word B and generated some great phrases: thunderbolt shuffle, humbug detector, stolen epidemic, chocolate dimension (I live in that one!).  Press the reset button and choose a different order.  Word B followed by word A gave duplicity charabanc and constellation spider.  So much to discuss in terms of meaning for these words individually and when combined.

Click reset again and this time try 3 words.  AAB gave me midnight American forbidding and quiet gorgon phenomonen.  With 3 words you sometimes have to make changes to  make sense but that is OK.  If you want to keep some of the words click on them and then press whizz again.

There are so many combinations to try.  This is a fantastic tool to support children in identifying unusual combinations of words that have a sense.  What’s the best combination that you come up with?

If only I knew how to use Flash, I would make one of these that allowed teachers and children to put in their own words and whizz them.  Maybe a little summer holiday task?

As part of our talk for writing initiative, we have been thinking about writer talk recently.  This is where we consider the emotion or response that the writer triggers in us and then how they did it.

One of the things that we all know is that writers read.  Stephen King in On Writing, a memoir of the craft says

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. p142

I have been enjoying Waterstone’s Writer’s choice over the last few months.  This is a display of 40 books that authors have found to be important to them for a variety of reasons.  I particularly like the little cover which they write for each book.

What a great idea this would be for children to do.  They could compile a list of 5 or 10 books that are really important to them and their writing and pen a little cover explaining why.  This would make a great display in a classroom or library.

Kate mosse is the current author and I have selected several of her choices for holiday reading.