Literacy Resources

Starting at the beginning of this month, we have been sharing a word game every school day  on our Facebook page. The games are suitable for all ages and can be seen on the wall or click on the Boxes tab. Next month we will be releasing subject knowledge grammar videos for teachers. What grammar [...]

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 [...]

We quite often play a game on training days suggested by Pie Corbett in his book JumpStart! StoryMaking called Disasters.  Pie gives an example of 5 disasters for Superman such as his Dad tells him not to start fights or  his Gran gives him kryptonite pants for christmas. In order to be able to play [...]

Visual literacy is a vital part of life nowadays. It exists as an area in its own right but it can also be used to support the teaching and learning of  writing. This post is an attempt to describe how we do that. We:- use images to support understanding of literary techniques, e.g. putting title slides in [...]

Here’s a great activity for warming up the word.  Whenever you read to children get them to record phrases that stand out for them, particularly from poetry and fiction.  Record these and dipslay so that all can see. Give children thirty seconds to choose 3 or 4 of their favourite and to put them together to create [...]

For some time now as a team we have been thinking about the role of talk for writing in improving writing.  This has been aided by Pie Corbett through attending training and reading his books.  It has become clear to us that there are several key points when planning teaching sequences that need to have [...]