An ever-growing treasure trove of resources here for you to use.

Not subscribed? Never fear! Scroll down.You'll find a few free-access lesson ideas below. 

January 2020 

Writing Conventions: Good Better Best

By the end of this lesson, your students will have a co-created single-point rubric to which they can refer when they’re ready to edit their work. I can’t guarantee that it’ll solve all of our “They don’t use punctuation!” woes. But we can be assured that we’ve been explicit about our expectations, and that students know the difference between poor use of conventions and excellent use of conventions.
​And that they know what to do to improve. 

December 2019

Comprehension: Determining a Character's Motivation

​In this lesson, we’re teaching students that good readers infer a character’s feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justify these inferences with evidence. Understanding a motivation - why it is that the character does what they do - helps us understand more about the kind of person the character is.  We’re going to encourage students to add their thoughts about character motivation, and not just stop at simply stating the character’s actions, speech and thoughts. Sometimes the why comes earlier in the story and other times, we need to read on, and still, at other times, we have to infer it.

November 2019

Introducing the Writing Traits Like a Secret Sauce

In this lesson, you're going to reveal to students the secret sauce of writing. This sauce makes writing so much tastier! That secret sauce is the writing traits. Good writers don’t just magically compose fantastic texts. They use the secret sauce of the seven writing traits to help them make their writing stronger and more effective. The traits provide a common language for talking about writing, and teaching each one helps students become stronger writers. Introducing the traits assists your students to get to know a simple framework, to analyse and discuss the work of authors, and to plan and revise their own writing. 

October 2019

Student-Centred Spelling: Sound Strategy - Syllables

You can talk to young students about syllables all day long, and they simply won’t get tired of the discussion!
Or the clapping. They'll clap every syllable of every word you throw at them, and keep begging for more!
So, what do you need to know about syllables? Answers in the October freebie. 

September 2019

Fluency: Reading Dialogue Like the Character 

This lesson alerts young readers to the clues to watch out for to help them read with greater expression, and might just be the lightbulb moment for some of your robot readers!
Encourage students to practise their strong character voices during independent reading, and when they confer with you. 
​
Remember: As soon as you ask students to read aloud, they’re in ‘performance’ mode. Be very sure what your goal is. 

August 2019

Reading and Writing Conferences: The Compliment

Conferences.
I can hear a little groan coming from you lot out there.
Believe me - I know how difficult it can be to just get started. I'm working with an awesome team at a partner school and we decided we'd like to develop a menu of possibilities for approaching reading and writing conferences. To begin, we'll use the first thirty seconds-or so of each individual conference to compliment our students on a behaviour, or choice of goal, or use of reading strategy or writing trait. We'll spend a few days practising this, and developing our 'muscle' memory for this technique, before we move on to the Main Course. 
So, here is your August freebie...The Entree. If you're allergic to anything, feel free to change up the ingredients!

July 2019

Verbal Paraphrasing

Students who paraphrase can monitor their comprehension and learn new information. It’s a reading strategy that, once learned, facilitates writing skills, because students who paraphrase must undertake repeated reading, take careful notes, and expand their vocabulary as they wrestle with finding appropriate synonyms. This lesson is a good one to deliver just before you explore the perils of plagiarism, and a perfect segue to written paraphrasing. ​

June 2019

Simple Sentences​: Sassy Subjects and Vivacious Verbs

We know that a sentence isn’t just a string of words that start with a capital and end with a full stop, and yet we continue to accept that answer from our students for far longer than we should. By Year 5, students are expected to be using a variety of sentence types. So what is a simple sentence? ​​