Some Ideas about Teaching

Literacy Objectives

You could, and should, build literacy into every part of a lesson.

The key is to identify the required literacy element in your lesson objectives - not just spellings, but capitalisation, apostrophes etc.

Then:
1. You might 'do' that element of literacy for your starter.

2. You could angle one of the tasks you set during the main body of the lesson to the literacy skill in question. So if, for instance, you were doing active and passive tense of verbs, you could make one of your pairs exercises to go through the textbook passage you were studying and identify n active verbs.

3. Most of all - and without disrupting the History element of your lesson AT ALL - particularly with younger or less able pupils - you could set the literacy skill into the written task of the lesson. Thus, if you were doing active and passive verbs, you could type out the notes you wanted them to make in active tense, but they would have to convert them into passive tense (or from present into past, or adding apostrophes, or adding capitals in the right places etc. etc., depending on the literacy skill identified).


To be outspoken, all three of these elements should be occurring regularly in all History lessons, especially with less able and younger pupils, and if it wasn't and I were the HoD I would want to know why it wasn't.

Posted on: Mar 13 2006, 08:01 PM