Literacy Resources

We now produce a regular newsletter letting people know the new resources that we have found or created, courses that we are offering and ideas for teaching and learning in literacy.  If you would like to receive a copy please complete the form below using the tab button to move down the form and click on submit.

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 word activities 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.

We are asked all the time for our planning format.  It is on our website but having played with Scribd it is now here too!

Teaching and Learning Sequence Overview With Guided

I have always wanted to be a member of a book club and talk about books that I am reading but have never been able to find one in my area. When I last went into my local library and enquired about them, I was asked if I wanted to run one.  No!  I just want to be part of a group, not lead one.

Well here is connecting and collaborating via the web coming to fruition.  I regularly read the blog Dangerously Irrelevant by Dr Scott McLeod and was delighted to find that he was running a book club.  I must be the one from the UK!  I have to say that it is not a book that I would pick up and read if left to my own devices, but then isn’t that what this is all about.

Visit Core Knowledge and read about  Dan Willingham’s book and visit his website for some interesting articles .

So, what am I expecting to get out of this experience?  I am not entirely sure but I know that many people working on a book, discussing meaning and debating the issues can only increase my understanding and deepen my appreciation.  And the fact that we can do this digitally means that I get an international experience .  I shall be looking in as much detail at the tools used to host such a group as I will taking part in the discussions.  This week is discussions about the introduction and chapters 1 and 2.  The blog where we are discussing the book is open for everyone to visit.

I am rereading Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes at the moment and there is so much to talk about in it – not least how we teach children to write.  If you could choose a book to discuss in a book group what would it be?

Learning and remembering texts is a great way to engage children with patterns of language.  In fact is it not just children that enjoy it.  Teachers do too!

Learning and remembering texts from joy simpson on Vimeo.

This is a multisensory way of working involving visual maps as cues, actions to lead the voice, special and funny ways of saying things to make them memorable, working in groups for support and telling the text lots of times in different ways.

We use the structure suggested to us by Chris Smith at our Talkfor Writing Conference in February of

• Hear it
• Map it
• Step it
• Say it

This is all about boiling a text down to its bare bones and then building it back up with your own words and ideas.  The impact that we have seen of this in classrooms is fantastic.  Children have been enthusuastic about writing, have used rich language and have amazed themselves and their teachers.

A big thank you to all who have been so ready to take the ideas and try them out.  We love the results!

If you have attended any of our conferences or tried something out in your classroom related to Talk for Writing, leave us a comment and let us know what happened.

If you are a fan of visual thinking tools , which I am, and of tools for collaboration then you will probably enjoy myWebspiration.

Click on the map to zoom in and explore in more detail.

There is a clear explanation about why visual thinking is such a powerful tool and a getting started guide.  If you are an Inspirations user then many aspects will be familiar to you.

What I particularly like are the collaborative aspects of this tool.  You can invite other users by email to join you in working on the document.  They can add to the map and edit it, they can add notes and can look at the changes that have been made using the tool bar at the top of the map.  These are all useful if working asynchronously but if several people are working on the document at the same time, then I really like the chat tool built into the programme.  Collaborators will need to sign up to use the tool but it is quick and easy to do.

myWebspirations is in Beta form and so asks for your feedback when using it.  There are small feedback forms on every page of information in the quick guide.  It doesn’t say whether once this tool leaves beta form if it will still be free so sign up now and start using it.

I have to own up to using very few tools from the lesson activity toolkit in SMART notebook, so it was with interest that I read about an update for the lesson activity toolkit.

To access the update open up SMART notebook and then open the gallery.  At the side of the search box you will see a little spanner.  Click on that and then updates and finally lesson activity.

I particularly like the keyword pad and think that it has many uses in Literacy.  I have long been frustrated at how you had to deal with individual words or phrases if you wanted to isolate them to look at them in more detail. Well now I am not.  This means that text analysis is much easier.  To see an example of how this activity could be used, see the short video below. 

Using Keyword Pad from joy simpson on Vimeo.

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?

So now that you know how you can use a blog, the time has come to find a suitable host for your blog.  This is Day 5 of 20 days to better blogging with children.

There are many different places to host blogs and what you use will depend upon what you want to do.  There are several sites comparing blogs but they quite often don’t include sites such as edublogs which have been specially developed for educational use. 

To overcome this I have set up a wiki which is open to all to allow people to compare the hosting facilities and to add others that are not included.  I use both Blogger and edublogs.  I find Blogger is the easier to set up and that edublogs offers you a lot more options.  Your decision will probably be based upon how ICTish you are and whether you are willing to pay to remove the adverts.  You will also need to decide whether you want a blog per child, a blog for a group of children or one blog  where you are all authors.

And then you need to go and set up the blogs!

What a wonderful event and what a wonderful idea.  Thanks @AngelaStockman for sharing it.  Make a video of three words that sum up your experience.  Here are the films from the Special Olympics.  I am amazed at the number of different ways they found to share those words.

We could use this to summarise just about anything: a special event, learning, how we feel, what we are looking forward to, our favourite book, what we like about writing.  in fact the list is endless.  Having just finished a project about guided writing this would have made a wonderful starting point and end point to see if attitudes towards writing have changed.  You could even use it to tell a story about yourself with a carefully chosen image. 

 
These 3 Words – The best video clips are here

It seems that even abcNews has a slot for our three word videos.

What would your three words be?

Linked posts 3 Word Videos from Angela Stockman