- Wednesday 07 November 2018
The Teacher Guide:
When we wrote Lizzie and the Birds, Mick and I really wanted children to love the book and for teachers to use it to inspire all aspects of English teaching and learning.
Utilising my knowledge as an English consultant, I wanted teachers to have everything they needed at their fingertips to produce innovative and engaging work with their pupils. I decided to generate activities for each of the spreads of the picture book and created a bank of activities, with downloadable Powerpoint slides, word banks, synonym circles and writing frames, that could be used with different age-groups. I then gave these resources to a number of different teachers to use with their pupils. These ‘guinea pigs’ produced lots of pieces of work and these were then used within the Teacher Guide to show real models from teachers, and a variety of different work produced by pupils.
I had lots of ideas for each spread, so I produced a quick overview at the beginning of the Teacher Guide, so teachers can see the variety of learning outcomes that can be attained from each page. Here is an extract:
There are teacher notes to support all aspects of teaching, with detailed guidance and all resources needed to teach in an innovative way. For example, my idea was to give a systematic structure to show teachers how to model writing using specific criteria that could then underpin the pupil’s writing. Here pupils are asked to look at the images of the birds and produce superlatives to describe them:
Pupils are then then asked to orally describe their favourite bird to their partner using some of these superlatives, before their teacher shows them how to write about them using subordinating sentences and contractions:
The Teacher Guide gives the teachers all the components to support the teaching and includes an example of children’s writing to show them how pupils can produce high standards of writing independently:
I was also keen to show how Lizzie and the Birds could be used with older pupils by giving examples of more challenging pieces of writing, such as writing in role as Buster the cat, apologising for trying to gobble up all the birds:
The guide is also packed with ideas for cross-curricular activities, including art work and D.T.:
I also wanted the whole text to be written out so that it could be used for guided reading and text marking:
I believe it is vitally important for comprehension to be linked to high quality texts:
I was also fortunate to be able to use my friend Maddy Barnes (@Moonmaddy) approach to reading, by utilising her reading mat structure:
@MoonMaddy and I were also keen to link a grammar, punctuation and spelling test aimed at the end of KS 1 directly to Lizzie, so teachers could see how this could be developed for other year groups:
To visit the shop page for Lizzie and The Birds click here.
Follow Dawn Robertson @justdawned on Twitter and don't forget Lizzie has her own page too @LizzieNTheBirds.
