Literacy Solutions Blog

We have just published sets of writing text type charts as a download on the Literacy Solutions’ website.

Writing: text type chart

Each ‘Writing Text Type Chart’ features an overview or brief description to support students to understand the text purpose. Some charts are accompanied by a reference guide. The charts are designed to use as permanent displays in your classroom or to print when working with …

The Six Traits of Writing is an approach for planning, teaching, and assessing students’ writing. The approach has gathered momentum over past decades due to the explicit teaching of writing skills and behaviours for students of all ages, teaching at all stages of the writing process, active involvement of students in assessment and monitoring and clear and consistent metalanguage. The Traits is not a program …

Rubrics are the most common way to assess the quality of student writing samples when implementing the Six Traits of Writing . In response to schools we support and teacher requests for assistance with Six Traits’ rubrics, we are pleased to share our Rubric Scorer. This tool is simple to use and is easily applied to assess one or multiple Traits.

What is the …

Most children acquire vocabulary through real life experiences.

Research studies identify strong links between the working vocabularies of young children and their subsequent reading achievement levels. There is widespread agreement that vocabulary is one of the keys to reading. Not only is it a valuable predictor of reading success in the early years, but it continues to impact achievement levels well into secondary …

Our new book, The Comprehension Toolkit (Ages 5-8) is now available for purchase. This is the most comprehensive publication we have developed to assist teachers to develop the comprehension skills of young readers. It has been designed to help teachers deliver high yield outcomes with highly structured support.

The Comprehension Toolkit (ages 5-8): now available

We’re enormously proud of this publication and feel confident early …

‘The Comprehension Toolkit (Ages 5-8)’. 82 reading lessons for busy teachers.

I’m very excited share some details about our upcoming book, The Comprehension Toolkit (Ages 5-8). The book is currently with our printer, but should be available in just a few weeks.

The Comprehension Toolkit (Ages 5-8) is a 240 page teacher workbook containing 82 lessons for busy teachers. The book is designed to assist teachers …

‘The Daily Write (Early Years)’ – A book of writing prompts for teachers of Years P-2.

The Daily Write (Early Years) is a 48 page publication containing stimulus pictures with accompanying writing prompts. The book is designed for teachers to use as a shared text in poster format.

Daily writing, even for short periods of time, supports students to generate ideas, develop fluency of thinking, translate …

‘The Daily Write’ – A book of writing prompts for teachers of Years 2-6.

The Daily Write is a 48 page publication containing stimulus pictures with accompanying writing prompts, suitable for individual, or whole class use. The book is printed in full colour to enable teachers to remove and laminate pages and store as part of a classroom learning centre if desired.

Daily writing, even for …

Cheerful Pens, Mastery Circuit, Sliding Cards, The Reading Wall, (Higher yield) Reading Stamina and Peer Tutoring

This is for those who’ve asked, formally and informally over the years. Our conversations have been short and often rushed. In workshops and consulting, the focus is on teaching or demonstrating the strategies, but time never permits a fuller explanation about where the ideas originated and what underpins them. As …

The Mastery Circuit was inspired by learnings in education, psychology, neuroscience and marketing … But mostly by Dame Marie Clay and her insistence that hard to teach students must overlearn one element every day while participating in the Reading Recovery Program.

Though this idea does not guarantee memory of subskills for all learners 1, it is highly effective for many. Background notes for this strategy are …