Literacy Teaching & Assessment

The purpose of this meeting is to explain the end of Key Stage One expectations for Literacy and to show you how the children will be taught and assessed in school.

We teach 4 Literacy lessons a week.

During the week, the children will complete a range of activities. Sometimes this will be working as a whole class, working with an adult, working in mixed ability pairs or groups and working independently in the shared area.We often make our literacy lessons cross curricular and active. This may involve workshops, drama, music and video clips. These strategies can be used to stimulate and excite the children towards the writing activities. Enabling them to create word banks, use exciting vocabulary and immerse themselves in the writing experience.

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Literacy Teaching & Assessment

In Year 2 the children are expected to write using a variety of genres. These are some of the genres that we teach;

~ Non-fiction factfiles~ Diary entries~ Letters~ Stories~ Instructions~ Writing as a character~ Poetry~ Recounts and accounts

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Literacy Teaching

To allow children to do their best possible piece of writing we take several steps to ensure that they are given many opportunities to develop their language and understanding of a

topic – through visual, written and verbal experiences – for example South Africa.

Before the children could create their South Africafact files we provided them with the following inputs;

~ African drumming workshop~ video clips of South Africa

~ Non-fiction texts about South Africa~ Fiction stories about South African people and animals

~ Using the internet to research information~ Talks from people who had lived in or visited South Africa

~ Exploring South African artefacts~ investigating non-fiction texts and their features and creating a toolkit for the

children.

We endeavour to provide similar experiences for each of the children’s writing experiences.

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Literacy Learning at home

Each week in the contact note we provide ideas for activities that you can complete with your child – these are always activities that will support their learning in school and better

prepare them for subsequent activities.

Here are some other ideas of how you could prepare your child for writing challenges:

~ using the internet to research new topics~ visiting the library to look for relevant texts

~ visiting locations that may be linked to our topic e.g. Pudding Lane~ collecting word banks of vocabulary

~ reading diaries, newspapers, recipes, magazines, comics and discussing their similarities and differences

~ watching films or video clips that are linked~ reading the key texts that we are using – these will be referenced on the

contact note if relevant.

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The writing process

~ Once the children have had a range of experiences the children are then given an opportunity to record their ideas, often in an unaided session

~ Then they are asked to re read their work and edit it using a purple polishing pen (PPP)

~ The children then self assess their working using the traffic light system

~ Then the piece of work is marked by the teacher with stars * and wishes

~ Finally the children read the teacher’s marking and respond appropriately.

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Literacy Teaching & Assessment

We encourage the children to evaluate their own learning through our traffic light system.

We also expect the children to read theirprevious next steps and use this to improve their next piece of writing.

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Writing• There isn’t a writing SATs paper, writing is purely judged on Teacher assessments

of the child’s writing in class.

• The answer to being a good writer is books and stories. If your child reads and is read lots of good quality texts then they can ‘steal’ the ideas from these stories and put them in their own writing.

• Notice punctuation and grammar features in reading….can you spot a verb on this page? A comma? An apostrophe? A contraction? Why are they used?

• Practise and learn weekly spelling lists and revise old spellings – make it fun – if your child is an able speller then stretch them by asking them to write extended sentences or different sentence types, or theme them around our topics.

• Encourage opportunities for writing, such as letters to family or friends, shopping lists, notes or reminders, stories or poems.

• Write together – be a good role model for writing.

• Encourage use of a dictionary to check spelling.

• Allow your child to use a computer for word processing, which will allow for editing and correcting of errors without lots of crossing out.

• Show your appreciation: praise and encourage, even for small successes!

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Reading – Expectations for the End of Key Stage 1

Reading in school is taught and assessed in a variety of ways.We carry out ‘reading workshop’ every morning and we will endeavour to read

with 1 group of similar ability children each day.

Groups of children will complete reading or spelling based activities on a rotation throughout the week. This provides them with opportunities to

reinforce our spelling and grammar lessons, share books with their friends, read independently and make links to our Rights.

When we read with the children we will read a variety of text – this may include:

~ colour banded books (a progressive scheme)~ leaflets

~ non-fiction texts~ story books

~ comprehension activities~ poetry

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This is the colour banded scheme that we follow and use for

assessment.

A child working at the expected level at the end of Year 2 would be reading Purple

level or higher.

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How to help your child with reading

Listening to your child read can take many forms:

• First and foremost, focus developing an enjoyment and love of reading.

• Enjoy stories together – reading stories to your child is equally as important as listening to your child read.

• Little and often is best! But your child must develop their reading stamina.

• Talk about the story before, during and afterwards – discuss the plot, the characters, their feelings and actions, how it makes you feel, predict what will happen and encourage your child to have their own opinions. Can they relate it to other books/stories that they know?

• Practise finding specific answers that are written in the text.

• Look up definitions of words together – you could use a dictionary, the Internet or an app on a phone or tablet.

• All reading is valuable – it doesn’t have to be just stories. Reading can involve anything from fiction and non-fiction, poetry, newspapers, magazines, football programmes, TV guides and leaflets.

• Visit the local library - it’s free!

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Reading

The Reading Test consists of two separate papers:

• Paper 1 – Contains a selection of texts totalling between 400 and 700 words with questions about the text.

• Paper 2 – Contains a reading booklet of a selection of passages totalling 800 to 1100 words. Children will write their answers to questions about the passage in a separate booklet.

• Each paper should take approximately 30 minutes to complete, although the children are not being assessed at working at speed so will not be strictly timed.

• The texts will cover a range of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

• Questions are designed to assess the comprehension and understanding of a child’s reading.

• Some questions are multiple choice or selected response, others requireshort answers and some require an extended response or explanation

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Reading & questioning

Being able to read words is simply not enough – the children need to demonstrate that they understand what they have read. We (and the SATs)

assess this through questioning.

We will ask them questions that require them to:

~ Retrieve information e.g. can you find the word that tells me that the giant was big?

~ Understand vocabulary e.g. What does the word ‘fierce’ mean?~ Predict what may happen next e.g. What do you think might happen to the

Princess next?~ Ask them their opinions of stories e.g. Which is your favourite Roald Dahl

book and why?~ Compare texts e.g. What other stories does this book remind you of and why?~ Retelling and sequencing stories e.g. What was the first event that happened

in this story?~ Multiple choice e.g. Which of these words described the elf?

~ True or false questions e.g. The mouse was scared of the cat – true or false?

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How to help your child

• CHILDREN WILL NOT BE TOLD THAT THEY ARE DOING TESTS! They will be asked to ‘do a special booklet’ with their teacher. This will reflect the way they usually work with their teachers in the classroom or other areas of the school.

• Always support your child and remind them that that they should always just try their best. Praise and encourage!

• Ensure your child has the best possible attendance at school.

• Support your child with any homework tasks.

• Reading and spelling activities are always good to practise.

• Talk to your child about what they have learnt at school and about the book(s) they are reading (the character, the plot, their opinion).

• Make sure your child has a good sleep and healthy breakfast every morning!

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