Live Courses
Book your courses here on our website, your school will be sent an invoice, or you personally (if you are booking as an individual). No payment is required at the booking stage. Click here to view our terms and conditions.
A half-day online course to maximise the impact of guided reading lessons.
Do you want to revisit guided reading to make it a more effective part of your reading policy?
This course will help you to refresh these sessions with new activities and tools to engage pupils and explore ways to make planning easier for teachers.
We will:
- Examine the structure of a guided reading lesson and consider how to focus on a learning intention
- Look at ways to begin a session with an energetic starter to enhance pupils’ vocabulary banks and help them to understand how language works.
- Consider how to include stopping points to promote discussion about a text’s features
- Explore tools and activities that will help pupils to investigate text
With a new toolkit, you can strengthen your school’s guided reading programme.
This course explains how teachers can use whole class Drama to stimulate and practically support children, as individual and collaborative talkers and writers. It outlines how teachers can co-participate, as models, co-writers, editors and commissioners of writing at different stages of the writing process. Drama provides meaningful contexts, reasons and audiences for writing, as well as generating shared experiences and meaningful content. Some key Drama strategies will be presented as ‘Thought and Talk’ frames and links made between certain Drama strategies, different types of talk, and specific types of writing. A primary drama lesson will be presented, (a step at a time) and ways in which it is specifically supporting and leading children into writing, will be highlighted.
- 2 ‘Drama for Writing’ lessons
- The edited Powerpoint (as a PDF)
- 2 published articles
- A booklet of Drama Strategies
A half-day online course to refresh the teaching of reading.
To become effective readers pupils need to crack the phonic code and learn to make meaning independently. Pupils need explicit teaching to become effective readers and many daily opportunities to practise and apply their skills in live contexts. The 9 Reading Behaviours help pupils to learn what to do as they read. Initially, pupils learn each behaviour one-by-one, and overtime they learn to synthesise the behaviours, choosing the most useful strategies to unlock a text in any given context. Overtime they learn to synthesise the behaviours, choosing the most useful strategies to unlock a text in any given context.
The 9 Reading Behaviours help pupils to solve problems as they read, engage with the text and to reflect on content.
The course provides examples of strategies to teach each behaviour in literacy lessons and across the curriculum.
A half-day online course to enhance the teaching of writing.
Pupils’ spelling, punctuation and grammar errors far too frequently make their writing clumsy and hard to read. Their creativity and knowledge can be obscured by weak transcription skills.
This course will consider techniques to help you and your pupils to focus on accuracy in writing.
We will:
- Explore ways to help pupils to learn from their spelling errors
- Investigate how to support pupils to edit their work after completing the first draft and before marking
- Consider what pupils can do after marking to learn from any highlighted errors.
With support and guidance pupils can learn to write with clarity and precision.