Over many years of trial, error and professional reading I’ve discovered a few ways to genuinely improve student literacy. These ideas are not new, but I wish I was aware of them years earlier in my teaching career. I thought I would share some of the resources that I have created using these ideas.

Overview

Teaching writing

In the teaching writing section you will find explicit slide decks to support you to teach a range of sentence structures and ideas. I don’t teach the concepts as they are in the slide decks, but this was the easiest way for me to communicate the ideas to an unknown audience.

This is a blog page which will feature the latest posts at the top. If I can work out how, I’ll pin the fundamental skills post to the top. The art of the sentence contains a range of explicit, modelled and guided teaching slide decks on a a range of sentence structures. There are more posts coming.

Resources

In this section you will find a range of resources utilising the first chapters of novels. Each resource has prereading, post reading and language activities for you to choose from. I haven’t created these to be a lesson where every activity and focus area is used, but the intention was to try and create some differentiated resource for teachers to be able to choose what sentence aspect they will focus on from the story.

Teaching inference (Coming soon)

This is a beginning section of the page. The resources try and support this concept in the 3 Level Reading guides, but I want to make explicit that when we teach kids to write well we are teaching them to make readers infer. When we say “show” don’t “tell” we are saying make the reader infer! The tools provided provided explicit ways for you to teach students this.