A number of colleagues have been lucky enough to attend training run by Alan Peat. Below are the books* I currently have at my disposal in my classroom. These books, the information brought back from the training and our adoption of a whole-school approach to English coverage has transformed my teaching of English and in turn the children's attainment an application (across the curriculum) of rules of written English.
In addition to those books, at the time of writing, I have the following apps* installed (indicated by 'Downloaded') on my iPad device:
Whole school - The first message that came back from the training was for us to use a whole school approach: share vocabulary, tools, displays, diagrams and so on. These were mostly from Alan's training, but in staff meetings, we also generated vocabulary and resources we wanted to us.
Punctuation - Alan's book was purchased for each class. As a result, every teacher had at their disposal a book that gave informative and useful information about each punctuations type and how children could be taught how to use them.
Sentence Types - As with the punctuation book, 'Writing Exciting Sentences: Age 7 Plus' was also purchased for each class. Again, teachers now had a method of helping children to improve the variety of sentence structures used in their writing. We looked at which sentences could be introduced in each year group and the accompanying app helped us know with which text types to use the sentences.
Language - Throughout the training, books and apps (as mentioned before), the main factor in helping children to improve their writing ability has been through shared and consistent vocabulary that children can hear again and again and become increasingly familiar with.
Apps / books at home - We've shared the apps and books with parents to allow them to reinforce this learning outside of the classroom.
These are just our experiences and it's been very positive. There's much more Alan offers on his site and through his training. See alanpeat.com for more details.
*Some of these books / apps were purchased by the school we work at, others by us personally and some provided free of charge by Alan Peat Ltd. None of those were for the purpose or expectation of this blog post being written. This is, as always, the view and opinion of two full-time class teachers about something we use in the classroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment