You'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard about the 'new' requirement of the current government to ensure literacy and maths are taught for an hour a day each.
I don't know if you are anything like me, but when this policy was announced, it conjured up images of children sitting 'doing' literacy for exactly an hour. I know that this is not the intention of the policy, but it certainly is how some seem to be interpreting it. Let's get it straight, you would be hard pressed to find a classroom not doing an hour of literacy a day, but what we don't want is people focused on the length of time, instead we want them focused on quality teaching.
The policy itself feels like a 'soundbite' something to please voters, I guess we will have to wait and see what substance of understanding and resourcing comes with this policy, but while we are waiting, let me share how my 'hour' of literacy and 'hour' of maths might look on a day to day basis, in a junior class that embraces a pedagogy of play.
Before I do this I need to make a few things clear. Doing something for longer, does not necessarily mean I am doing it better and every teacher needs to understand more about the Science of Learning. Such as, the gradual release model, the self-teaching hypothesis, cognitive load theory, Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, what learning is and how we get learning into long term memory, why we need a scope and sequence, repeated practice, what is Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 support and what explicit teaching is etc.
Rather than go on here, I will direct you to Olwyn Johnstons facebook group, where she very succinctly explains these things and so much more.
I also firmly believe that every teacher needs to understand Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, DLD, ADHD, ASD and be able to use these understandings to shape approaches that will not only ensure success for these children, but all children. Having a degree of trauma informed practice training is also of immense benefit to teachers.
It would seem to be a priority for this government, if wanting teachers to truly teach literacy and mathematics successfully to all children, that they would provide the resourcing and training for all teachers to be well versed in these understandings. Again, doing something for longer, without making a change to practice, will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
I have blogged a bit about the features of my literacy programme and these things of course morph and change over the year as children progress, below is a very simple breakdown of how things may look. What is important to remember, is that I am constantly noticing, recognising and responding tweaking my approaches to cater for the needs I am seeing. I have a Year 2 class, with a few older Year 1 children.
Crucial to all of these is review, review is always built into the start of every session. Also crucial is maintaining an lovely perky, with what I am wanting them to learn, made explicit and not hidden inside lots of talk.
Please note the times are simply to demonstrate that over the day, just how much learning is literacy specific. It is also important to understand that via play, children are often also developing skills that they then bring into our structured sessions.
- Whole class literacy session (inclusive of phonological, reviewing sounds, learning a new sound, spelling sounds, spelling words, reading words, heart word spelling and reading, dictated sentence/s, reading sentences.).This session is broken into two parts if needed over the day, at the start I aim for sitting for not longer than ten minutes. Sessions in total would be 15-20 minutes. These sessions also contain songs and movement throughout and are presented in slideshow form. This is considered Tier 1, I always have 3-4 children that I am then working individually working with in Tier 2.
-Handwriting, we teach this separately as well as focusing on formation within our literacy session. We used Casey as a bridge from our juniors and then tag these to working on the formation of the graphemes, also easily linked to the phoneme as a nice review. We found last year that an explicit focus on handwriting really made a massive difference to our class. This is about 10 minutes.
-Writing, to start the year, we are heavily focused on speech to print and use a lot of dictated sentences and word chaining. This is done within our literacy sessions, but we also take it out of these sessions as well as a stand alone. 10 minutes
-Writing - bridging from oral language we start with colourful semantics, coming up with ideas and creating a full sentence. All out loud to start with and can be linked to representing in visual form. We also do talk from images and use these to make up sentences. Initially I will scribe sentences, and gradually children become independent enough in spelling and formation to do this successfully. 10 minutes (slowly over the year children will begin to write more independently, either based on the knowledge building the ideas we are exploring, or simply because they have a story to tell)
-Writing, along with the colourful semantics and sentence building, we also work our way through the Syntax project lessons, I do modify them slightly for my needs. 10-15 minutes
-Fluency/ Performance - each two-three weeks we have a text, children are learning out loud. I do try to link it to our knowledge building, but sometimes these stand alone as a poem or rhyme. We learn a couple of lines a day, until we have the whole text known, we work on actions and our expression. Each day we practice to commit it to memory, we then perform it, either for another class, or to be videoed for sharing. 5 minutes
- Buddy Reading- Fluency- Repeated Reading - children have a buddy, chosen for a variety of reasons, but generally at a level that they can support one another. The text that they are reading changes according to need. It may be a word ladder, based on the sounds we are learning, it could be the poem that we are learning for our performance (once we know it quite well), it could be our decodable sentences from our literacy sessions or it can be a text that they can both read with one another's support, sometimes it is a mixture of these things. The key is repeated reading, so the text remains the same for the week, or sometimes more. 5-10 minutes
- Decodable stories - as you will have seen, if you have read my other posts, is that I write semi-decodable stories for my children, with their input. These stories include the code they know, but also elements they do not. Each day we read a section together, discuss the text and children illustrate that part. These get more complex over the year. 15 minutes ( some of this is the children drawing their pictures)
- Knowledge building, we always have an area of knowledge that we are developing, over the days I will read non-fiction texts, share videos, share images, share podcasts to listen to. Children will respond in a variety of ways, and over the year, they will start writing factual sentences. Can't really pin a time on this as it happens in pockets over the day and week and is often inspired by play.
-Storytelling, I use a lot of storytelling, puppets often feature, but stories come from my life, places, history, anything really. At times over the year, we will use talk for writing as well. Can't pin a time on this.
- Chapter book reading - I always have a book I am reading the class, children love listening to this and love talking about what is happening in the story. I try to read one or two chapters a day. Generally while we are eating lunch, or at the end of the day. 10 minutes.
- Review based games - I try to intermingle over the week games that review the sounds we are learning, generally in the form bingo type games that are quick and easy to set up. 5 - 10 minutes
There is absolutely no way this all happens every day, highlighted in orange are the things I like to get to daily when possible. It is important to note, that often writing is an intermingling of the things noted above and it is worth following my number agent group on facebook to see what these actually look like.
Play is intermingled throughout our sessions and of course our knowledge building is linked to our learning in other curriculum areas and often drama is used as a tool for learning to that links strongly to literacy. Of course it is not always possible to fit what I want to fit in and this is not intended to be a reflection of the other things that are included in our day, this post is just about literacy and I will do another about maths.
Our days are fluid and we do not have a timetable, we simply write down in our A4 daily book what we 'must do' 'want to do' and would 'like to do' things we do not get to, are written down for the next day. Again, quality over quantity.
We also have an individual goal setting system with children that we are constantly working on with individual children in the moments we have free, this ensures that I know where I need to pinpoint support.
The reality is classrooms and schools are busy places, we have so many demands on our time and so much to fit in, what is most important, is that what we teach, we teach it well and give our children (all of our children) the best possible chance of really learning.
By the way, I have not mentioned the time it actually takes to get young children ready to start in our sessions (I know junior teachers know what I am talking about) I think it often takes us longer to get set up, then to take part in the session itself.
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