On Tuesday I gave a presentation to the Junior Syndicate to share my learning of critical literacy. As teachers we all aim to prepare our students for success in this ever changing world and I believe Critical Literacy is just one area in which we can do this.

Shift since using new writing criteria

In using the new criteria sheet at writing time my students are now producing stories that are in sequence and have the correct structure for a recount, however we are not producing a lot of detail or interest words it is time to make a change.

I introduced this book by Roald Dahl, The Enormous Crocodile. This book is a good introduction to words that can add detail and interest to a story. Each day we read aloud 3-5 pages. The students were hooked! We looked closely at any new language that was introduced and thought aloud of ways we could use it, for example: the word swizzle.

 appeared in the sentence buddy of some students that wrote about playing hide and seek with their friends . I swizzled my head around quickly as I looked for my friends. We also printed off colourful adjective cards from sparklebox and grouped those as an activity - what words had similar meaning, what words had opposite meaning, put all the colour words together etc.