Literacy Resources

Dear Educational Publishers, Just recently you have really improved your provision of phonically decodable texts.  It is not easy to write a book that contains only the sounds /s/ /a/ /p/ /t/ /i/ /n/ but you have done a stirling job. This one can be used after week 5 of phase 2 of Letters and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I have long been a fan of Morris Gleitzman and his way of dealing with serious issues.  My favourites are Two Weeks with the Queen, BumFace and Once (hear the first chapter of each book by clicking on the link). Recently one of the school library centre managers passed me a copy of Grace and [...]

When children start to move away from reading schemes it is very important that they find books that are at just the right level that they will enjoy.  One of the best ways of doing this is to introduce children to books in series as this means that there is a good chance that if [...]

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with reciprocal reading but it is a well-researched method of teaching reading comprehension.  The researchers Palincsar and Brown developed the idea and their work is very accessible on the internet, including long term studies. Reciprocal reading focuses on four key strageies that are predicting, clarifying, questioning [...]

class1a on animation from Matty Dawe on Vimeo. During an animation project that has spanned this year, I have been concentrating  on what progression in animamtion looks like.  Now that I have a little time I want to spend some time reflecting on what the animation did for literacy learning.  I want to think beyond [...]

I have enjoyed watching teachers’ faces as they read Tadpole’s Promise by Tony Ross and Jeanne Willis. Usually they are shocked as the book lulls us into a false sense of security thinking that there is a happy ending. Even the bubbles on the front cover lead us this way.   But in a tragedy, [...]

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 [...]