We have been developing some training videos which you can use, either just to watch on your own, or with your class in a kind of on-line team teaching situation. As I write we have three weeks of lessons, with each week containing a video for days one to four.
There is also one training video for children in P6/7, which is a spelling investigation. It comes with a pack of activities. We will continue to add a few more to this group.
If you would like access to these, let me know, and I’ll add you to the shared drive.
Are you interested in learning more about the new PM Benchmark Literacy Assessment 2? Julian Duncan a trainer for PM Benchmark will run training on the 15th and 18th of March 2021.
The training is suitable for School Managers, ASN teachers and class teachers.
It equips teachers with accurate and robust assessment tools to identify students’ instructional or independent reading levels. The resource offers a complete literacy assessment, allowing teachers to conduct reading records to effectively capture students’ progress in reading fluency, retelling abilities and comprehension within and beyond the text.
When Monday 15th March at 15:30 to 16:30
Thursday 18th March at 15:30 to 16:30
To access the training link, please sign in through CPD.
We know how busy you all are, so we are continuing to put together some resources that may help.
We now have Poetry Packs 3 and 4 ready to go! Poetry Pack 3 is based on ‘Street Talk’ by J.K Annand and Poetry Pack 4 is based on ‘The Hill We Climb’ by Amanda Gorman. Both poems have a Scottish connection…read on to find out more!
Many teachers in Highland are planning, teaching and assessing writing using the Talk for Writing framework. This is not a one size fits all approach and needs to be adapted to suit your class.
We thought we’d share this example of good practice from Tore Primary School. Sally Thorne, class teacher, shares how she teaches writing while linking with other curricular areas and contexts.
Sally used ‘The Abominables’, a class reader from Pie Corbett’s reading spine as the stimulus for this unit of work. The unit was introduced with free writing on ‘If I met a yeti he….’ along with accompanying art work. This was successful in hooking the pupils, generating interest and excitement.
Sally shared the next steps…
“After group planning sessions, which includes building up word banks, I took one of the more successful plans, with tweaks and phrases from all groups and we created a class text that we could use for reading as a class. We pulled this apart for literacy techniques which could be used in the pupil’s writing.
This was then the basis for the pupils to plan and create their own story, a section at a time. As it’s a multi-stage writing process, some pupils are able to run with the idea, some need more support. I try to create texts that contain as many of the T4W techniques as possible: repetition, power of 3, starting with adverbs etc.”
Suzanne Callander (SAC Literacy Officer) has developed a range of support materials aimed at the the teaching of Listening and Talking at both Primary and Secondary level.
Suzanne will be running 3 sessions this week to share the materials and how these might be used. Join us on Tuesday 26th, Wednesday 27th and Thursday 28th at 1.30pm to hear more.
The link for training can be found on the Highland Digital School Hub on the calendar.
This houses all the resources teachers will need to get to know the toolbar themselves (see the ‘Getting colleagues on board’ section). There are also downloadable resources for teachers to use to spread the word to their students and parents.
2. Student/parent page – text.help/highland-students This page includes links to the home install guides for each platform. Also, there are additional resources for students/parents to learn more about Read&Write.
