A joint post brought to you by Highland Learning for Sustainability and Highland Literacy – developing Literacy skills through Learning for Sustainability
Check out Action Aid’s incredible, true story The Children Who Saved Their School to support the understanding of the global goals whilst developing literacy skills.
As Emerging Literacy continues to be developed across Highland we have, this year, been working with the local authorities within the Northern Alliance – Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Eilean Siar (The Western Isles), Moray, Orkney and Shetland – to further develop the approach across the north of Scotland.
As part of this we have undertaken data analysis on Phonological Awareness and Pre-Handwriting at the beginning of Primary 1 to gauge a baseline of skills within these two domains. This, along with information on the progress made between June and December 2016, can be found in the report on the link below:
A further two reports will be published in March and July to detail the progress made over an academic year.
The November 2016 Emerging Literacy update includes information on:
The Closing the Gap agenda in Scottish education aims to ensure that children and young people, regardless of their socio-economic background have an equitable chance of achievement.
CLICK HERE – National Improvement Hub: Approaches to Closing the Gap
To support our understanding of Child Poverty, Health and Wellbeing take a look at NHS Health Scotland’s new e-Learning module on Child Poverty, Health and Wellbeing – aimed at individuals working with children. It highlights how poverty can impact children and young people, looks at causes of poverty and explores how you can help tackle these issues.
To sign up and access the module, click the link below:
Whether you are developing the phonological awareness skills of rhyme awareness and rhyme production, or wishing to use rhymes whilst developing poetry with learners, click on the image above to access a selection of rhymes and songs courtesy of the BBC.
Back in May we posted a post on Adult Learning in Highland.
As part of Family Learning, Quality Indicator 2.5 within How Good Is Our School (4th Edition), schools are encouraged to actively promote lifelong learning, both in families, and as individual learners.
One suggestion we liked was having an area within the school or school grounds to have a ‘Little Free Library’, an area where families could drop off and pick up books to promote reading in the home.
Courtesy of @mandosally on Twitter
The Read, Write, Count website also has a number of suggestions for families on developing literacy and numeracy in the home.
We’d love to hear what you’re up to in promoting family learning in literacy. Leave a comment to let us know.
Do any of your children or young people in P5 – S1 read the Ruby Redfort series? As part of Book Week Scotland this week author Lauren Child will be speaking about her popular Ruby Redfort series, including the most recent title in the series Blink and You Die, as well as answering questions about her writing from pupils around the country.
Thank you to Smithton Primary School for sharing the link to this resource.
Wonderopolis is great site for developing Literacy, Language and Communication. Click the image above to access the site.
Each day comes with a new ‘wonder’, covering a multitude of topics. Each wonder is presented with ‘Wonder Word’ vocabulary relevant to the topic.
The passages that come with each wonder could be used as a stimulus for a shared or independent reading session that could be used to teach Higher Order Thinking Skills. Check out the Higher Order Thinking Skills tab for resources which can be used to support you in developing higher order thinking skills within your classroom.
When exposing learners to the vocabulary within the passages you could use the Building Vocabulary for Better Literacy materials to tier the vocabulary which would be ‘just right’ for using the Pre-Teaching Vocabulary approach.
During Book Week Scotland, Monday 21st – Sunday 27th November, Scottish Book Trust dare children/young people, their families and YOU to read . . . with a twist.
The Scottish Book Trust have created lesson plan resources to support the introduction of ‘reading dares’ for children and young people. The suggested ‘dares’ range from “Pretend to be a famous book character for a day and see if anyone guesses what you’re doing” in the Primary to “Use a quote from your favourite book in everyday conversation and see if anyone notices!” in the Secondary.
Make it a family affair (including the school family – YES TEACHERS, you can get involved too!) too. There is a great resource for adults to get involved.
Are you developing the use of similes and metaphors with learners? Do so through poetry, developing their understanding of the use of imagery.
Click the image above to access a BBC Clip which analyses the use of similes and metaphors within poetry. You may even find there are a couple of uses with references that allow for a bit of teaching about popular culture of the 90s!
HIGHLAND LITERACY 