CURRICULUM
Teachers' experience of... different aspects of literacy
"It really was the creative flair, the figurative language, that's actually stuff that we really value, that's what makes your day as a teacher, those teaching hours you get when they use that powerful in their writing but actually it doesn't count for hardly anything really in the exemplifications that we have."
Inspired by a whole school week on the theme of the 'Lost Words' book
“We did poems, we did incantations, we even did Father's Day cards based around it. So the trunk is showing you what we created in Year 6 and then at the top of the tree, the branches, is the whole school output. So across school we saw some visual literacy going on, nursery children taking photos with iPads, we've got some poetry, lots of forest school work outside, writing, lots and lots of art and design and technology being done across the school. So all of this inspired by one book and then being taken across by the school. We tried to put some measure in to it is the size of my acorns, the different feels that you got, so you see the biggest one is the feeling of pride of seeing the library, how it looks now that we've transformed it with the children's work, seeing the art work that was taking place across school.”
When the final destination is a poem, how do we get there?
“So we went to the woodland in school, concentrated on the senses, touching, hearing, what you can see, what you can smell. That was interesting actually. They said we've got conkers or it smells like.., so we did that. Some of them independently went on family outings to woods, they brought in conkers, acorns, leaves, so I suppose that was outside school. We went to the ICT suite where we looked at information about trees. We did actually do about the science of trees as well as to why they lose their leaves, what happens to them.”
Representing the different aspects of English teaching and literacy
“So I tried to think about the elements of a tractor and how that would link to English teaching and literacy teaching. I tried to think about the hours that I spend and ... where the parts of the tractor are in terms of the importance of the element. ...
I did a headlight for signposting others. I tried to think about the conversations ... where other people have come to me and said can you just look at this piece of work? Can you just give me your opinion? What do they need to do to move it on? So when I've signposted them to another resource or something like that and that's probably about an hour a week of incidental conversations, like the five minutes in the staffroom of let's just have a quick look at that book.”
How creativity flows from a good book
"So with regards to their creativity we did lots of writing. They did some where they described. We just got one of the landscapes and they described that. They also did fantastic artwork, really fantastic artwork. They did a character study of the two main characters, Eska and Flint, a boy and a girl about their age. Of course, whenever they said anything about that child they had to find the evidence in the text. It discusses Northern Lights so we looked at natural phenomena such as the Northern Lights. It talked about constellations. Again, about icebergs and how they form and how dangerous they are and animals that live in that environment. Then they wanted to actually extend the story, write what happens next type thing. So we did map reading skills."