Literacy at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1

1. Literacy

a. Introduction

As ITE literacy tutors we need to begin by encouraging student teachers to recognise their own literacy skills and knowledge. Literacy is a huge territory and students coming to it for the first time are all at different stages of awareness. The important thing is for tutors to start where the students are, to help them make links between their own experience of literacy and that of the children they will teach. We shall be suggesting some approaches and activities that might be appropriate to use at the beginning of a course, where they can work in groups:

to share personal reading biographies;
to review children’s fiction;
to interview children about their own reading preferences;
to plan and resource a classroom environment for literacy;
to engage in drama, role play and story telling;
to talk about their own experience of media and popular culture;
to experiment with the creative use of interactive white boards, digital video editing and ICT generally;
to develop their own writing skills.

Once they have begun to reaffirm the links between literacy and learning in their own lives, they can be introduced to the strategies and guidance that will influence their teaching in these key stages, through documents such as:

The National Curriculum
Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage
Primary National Strategy
Developing Early Writing
Letters and Sounds
Progression in Phonics
The Primary Framework for Literacy and Mathematics (referred to elsewhere as The Primary Framework)

and the wealth of additional training materials now available on the QCA and DfES websites.

In order to cope with the range of challenges that face the literacy teacher in the classroom, student teachers will need to understand what is meant by such terms as: ‘Early Learning Goals’, ‘Stepping Stones’, ‘Communication’, ‘Language and Literacy’ ‘Twelve Strands’, and many more.

Contents

Further ideas and suggested activities