Literacy is brilliant!

1. Literacy is brilliant! Tricky word challenge! 4-5 Sessions a week • Reading. • Writing. • Speaking and Listening.

2. A unit lasts 2-3 weeks and focuses on a text type, e.g. poetry, narrative or non- fiction. Talk is vital!

3. Getting children to be confident about expressing the opinions loudly and clearly is a huge part of Literacy. Ask them to suspend disbelief and step into a whole new world…. “Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire”W.B. Yeats

4. We don’t believe in lids… …we believe in challenge! All our Literacy sessions are taught in a challenging and open ended way so that pupils always have the opportunity to exceed expectations.

5. Guided Reading An opportunity to…. • Assess the children. • Develop their technical reading skills. • Develop their comprehension skills. See the school website (on handout) for an example of this.

6. What is phonics?We teach these two main skills… b – oa - t Virginia Bridge / Phonics glossary / August 2000

7. Knowledge of the letters, digraphs and trigraphs. At a glance, phonics is…. Skills of oral and written blending and segmenting. And tricky words of course! These are the basic skills needed for reading and writing.

8. A phoneme you hear and a grapheme you see A word always has the same number of phonemes as graphemes.

9. Sounds of English • 44 sounds or ‘phonemes’ • Pure sounds, the letter ‘m’ is ‘mmm’ not ‘muh’. • mst instead of must. The school website has a video that demonstrates the correct articulation of all these phonemes.

10. Jolly Phonics and Letters and Sounds Phase 1 Oral blending and segmenting: Hearing and saying sounds in words before learning to read and write them. Phase 2

11. Phase 3 – Digraphs (Phonemes or graphemes made up of two or more letters)

12. Phase 4 • Initial and final consonant clusters, e.g. free or went. Phase 5 • Alternative spellings and pronounciations of previously learnt phonemes and graphemes.

13. To make it a bit clearer for you…..!

14. Phase Six • Past tense, adding suffixes, e.g. ‘ly’, ‘ful’ ‘ness’ and spelling of more complex words.

15. Children need the opportunity to apply their phonic knowledge independently. Mistakes aren’t a problem, they’re a challenge! Self assessment is key! Bear this in mind when supporting children with home learning. Copying doesn’t help!

16. Children also need a bank of common words they can spell correctly from memory. The ‘tricky’ words. E.g. ‘sed’ should be ‘said’. In Year Two and later on in Year One, children are expected to use dictionaries or word mats to help them spell less common words that aren’t phonetic as well as using the Phase 5 mat to choose alternative spellings. 2b 2b 1b

17. Activity!WALT: understand how children use their phonics to help them spell. • Watch the video clip. With a friend, write down some adjectives to describe what you see and feel. • CATCH! You can only use the graphemes taught in Phase Two and Three, e.g. ‘carm’ instead of ‘calm’ and ‘byootifull’ instead of ‘beautiful’ (use the mats on your sheet as a guide). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HILk563MCh8

18. Let’s hear it for the boys! The gender gap is narrowing but there is still a lot to do…. • Outdoor writing – clipboards are great! • Comics. • ICT! (see handout for websites). • Toy Story pens and pencils. • Treasure hunts! • Shopping lists, letters, posters, labels – children love writing for a purpose! • Silly sentences. • Kung Fu Punctuation. • Calling all Dads, uncles, big brothers etc! Your school needs you!