LITERACY

Looking for a way to boost writing progress amongst your pupils this year? Searching for that elusive hook to inspire reluctant writers, or a way to showcase pupils’ work to a global audience? Step forward LitFilmFest - the Primary school festival, sponsored by YouTube Kids, that offers Key Stage 2 teachers free, fully-planned and resourced literacy units on a whole range of writing genres.

Two weeks ago we shared five key dates, from September to January, that schools can use to deliver lessons that offer something different. Here, we cover February to July.

Reading is a dying hobby. With the dwindling number of young voracious readers and no new takers for book reading as an interest, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the magic of reading has failed to charm the kids of today’s generation.

Pobble, the prize-winning global literacy initiative, has recently launched a new tool to facilitate lesson planning. Pobble Resources allows teachers to search content providers on Pobble and find the best teaching resources. They can then prepare the most engaging lessons easily, and share their lesson ideas, making collaborative planning really easy.

For 1600 lucky Primary pupils and their teachers, 19th June was no typical Monday. Marking the first ever LitFilmFest, 7-11 year olds from across the country were invited to the London BFI IMAX to watch their filmmaking and writing efforts projected onto the biggest screen in Britain!

We are in boom times for children’s and YA literature, it seems, and more and more publishers are publishing books that are engaging for struggling readers to get them more motivated to read. I’ve often found it easier to ‘rev up’ the reading of those that have low literacy levels than to excite the interest of the ‘can read, won’t read’ crowd. It seems amazing, and a little incomprehensible, to me that young people who are able to access the fantastic imaginations of fab authors don’t show any inclination to do so - do they not realise that they could be fighting with ninjas in Chris Bradford’s books or travelling through magical realms with Garth Nix’s Lirael?

Literacy in the choral music classroom is demonstrated when students are able to read pitch notation, manipulate rhythmic symbols, and execute dynamic and technical markings in the written score. Students are simultaneously singing correct pitches, changing the pitch durations according to the rhythmic structure, carefully raising or lowering the volume, and increasing or decreasing tempo of the notes based on the technical instructions notated in the score.

Here’s the problem with highlighting: Every day pupils highlight words in books. Their teachers hope that the words will resonate, be reviewed and spark some thought. For most though, highlighted words don’t do that.

Motivated by the writing and filmmaking efforts of classrooms across the country, this summer we’re hosting the very first LitFilmFest. This one-day event, taking place on Monday 19th June, will champion KS2 pupils’ writing and cinematic efforts, with winning classes shooting their films professionally before watching them on the biggest screen in Britain - the BFI London IMAX.

In June this year, 7-11 year-olds from across the country will descend on the BFI IMAX to attend LitFilmFest – a cinematic celebration of pupils’ writing achievements through filmmaking. Dominic Traynor, the festival’s founder, talks to us about the purpose of the event and how schools can get involved:

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