Literacy Resources

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.

Kidderlit is a wonderful idea.  A website that sends you the first line of a children’s book every day.  What a collection!  You can choose how you are sent the line: twitter, Google Reader, widget on your igoogle page or just visiting the site.

What are your favourite opening lines? You could generate a class list to display in the library.  If you use Edmodo in your classroom this would be a fantastic way to share them.  It may even introduce children to new books to read.  As Kidderlit is an affiliate of Amazon, there is a link to click to see what the book is.

This collection allows for some great work in literacy.  Which is your favourite line and why?  Which one makes you want to find out what the book is and read it? They could be sorted into groups, e.g. those that are about settings, character’s behaviour  etc.  They provide a wonderful resource for considering sentence structure as there is such a variety here.

Many thanks to Susan Stephenson at The Book Chook for having a widget for Kidderlit on her blog.  I enjoyed it so much I got one of my own!

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.

I have to say a big thank you to @mtechman for sharing this resource but now we have digital poetry from Poemsthatgo.  This is poetry that is written especially for the digital age and only works digitally.

Poetry that Goes is kinetic poetry, i.e poetry that moves and stems from concrete poetry.  The site details how this poetry came to be and several of the forms offer great study for the primary classroom.

I particularly like the Figure 5 Media Series inspired by William Carlos William from the 2001 archives.  It offers a great model for responding creatively to a poem through text, image, video and links.

The inspirations section is fascinating and offers several ideas and resources.  Seedsigns is fascinating and is almost a phonics lesson (although we might sound out the p and the h together to make f as a digraph ), it make sfor an interesting discussion and reading of the words.  I also like the ABC game although I haven’t quite ‘got it’.

I had to work quite hard to understand some of the poetry, in fact to read the words with the speed at which they appeared, but this is a site well worth investigating and some of the poems are fantastic to use as models with the children.

Linked posts:

• Digital Fiction: examples and ideas for the classroom
• Would you rather read on screen or on paper?
  

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?

 The title of this image is comments hell!  Day 8 of 20 days to better blogging is all about showing children how to engage with commenting on blogs in a way that goes beyond comment hell.  These are the comment equivalents of closed questions.  It is almost impossible to follow on and keep the converstaion going.

Commenting is one of the most important parts of blogging – be it as a reader or writer.  They are about continuing discussion which the blogger or another commenter has started. 

This process needs modelling with children so that they understand some of the processes that we go through when deciding what to write.  I think there are several types of comment and very often they will be determined by the post. 

• Quite often a post will end with a question.  If readers respond you get an extended post.
• Sometimes it will end in a manner that works with the rest of the post
• sometimes it is just a social occasion – see the number of comments on each post here!  You do have to learn to speak the language first.

Your task today is to find a blog that the children are interested in and, together with them, compose and submit a comment. 

Image by P!0

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.

moar funny pictures
This task is Day 7 of 20 days to better blogging with children.  We read blogs that cover areas that interest us  and so should children.  So, what are your children interested in?

I asked this question of a group of Yr 2 and Yr6 children that I was working with as part of a writing project, they were mostly boys, and received the following replies:

• lego – this took me to a whole new world and would lend itself to photoblogging.  There are at least 10 other lego blogs!  Why am I surprised?  They would be astonished that anyone would want to read about literacy and ICT.  How about using the BrickiWiki to find a blog?  No, no.  I must stop now but how about using lego to comment on current affairs – or build a baseball stadium?
• cars – this depends on what aspect of cars the children are interested in.  Even I am interested in paint scratches that repair themselves.  What about makes of car or photoblogging?
• books – there are so many that it is almost impossible to choose.  These are just to start you off.
• speedway racing – I did struggle here
• people around the world – this is hard one to search for but I did find some that would be suitable.  I think I would need to delve a little deeper here about what interests this child.
• cats (I didn’t cheat here honest!) - apparently cats even write their own blogs.  I have heard they twitter too.  There is no shortage here, but this is my all time favourite.  Lolcats galore.

These blogs would all support the teaching of reading  very well looking at how we respond to them as readers, how they are organised and how they convey their message.  Remember, in shared reading the children don’t have to be able to read the text themselves.  You model the reading and what you are thinking.

Posts need checking for appropriateness unless they are specifically written for children.  It may be that on the whole a blog is suitable but may have one or two postings that would not be.  They should be used in shared or guided time and you need to have checked them previously. 

So, what are your class interested in?  Let us know what blogs you find in these areas.  We could create lists to help other teachers.

Home page and rest of tasks – 20 days to better blogging with children