Tuesday 1 June 2021

T-Shaped Literacy for Juniors Year 1-3

Today we have the please of hearing the amazing Rebecca Jesson. 


We have been working around T-Shaped literacy for a while we have not seem this implement as well with junior learners. 

Wide reading

Is the notion that to learn about the world, to learn to read you need to learn widely. The benefits of wide reading go beyond school. If you think about the number of words you can say you learned them by talking and reading. There are many words we never say orally that we can read because we have read them in context. 

You get better at reading by doing it more!

We want children to be so engaged in reading that they want to read more. 

Wide reading looks like 5+ a day books. Just like eating vegetables for keeping our bodies and brains healthy we need to read 5+ to extend our brains and learn more words. 

But that is not enough. 

We want to do deep reading as well unpacking the key ideas and engage with texts critically. 

T-Shape literacy encourages us to use text sets that build ideas together. This allows learners to build understand over time. 

There are lots of different ways to think about texts sets. 

So why? 

-Build vocabulary

-Maintain decoding

-Build local inference 

When we as adults engage with a new concept we engage with multiple texts to draw conclusion. Research suggest that if you know something about it (have prior knowledge) it is easy to read about it. 

When we use multiple texts:

-Main text

-Simpler texts

-Complementary texts

-Challenge texts

So what does this look like at a junior level?

What is the big idea in the books. This can be found by looking at what the character learners and how they change during the story. 

Working together. 

What is the relationship between the main character and the side kicks. 

Likeable and unlikeable characters. 

By really thinking about this with learners from the moment they start school we are creating readers who are connected with ideas that they will engage with as readers for the rest of the life. 


So when planning we must ask.  What does this set of texts teach us. We are pulling the texts that are a bit different from a them. This leads to a provocation, this is a question or statement that can be engaged with on both side. 

Rebecca used a set of images to start the learning and provocation. Have some questions that we can ask for each book, then a big question that can get use connecting across texts. When coming up with this go back to the curriculum and think what is the area that connects best with the theme in the text. Prior knowledge should also be at the level of theme. Bring children to the new texts with some prior thinking. 

Creating a modelling book at builds around the theme. 

insist on evidence of what they think? 


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