Sellincourt School are one of the newer schools to join the Literacy Tree family, and that is exactly how it feels, being a part of something rather than simply having bought a product. Literacy Tree team are highly accessible and have been very supportive of our journey, going as far as to facilitate an emergency copy of a text that we hadn’t managed to source.
We discovered Literacy Tree when we were looking to develop our English writing curriculum. We loved that the plans would ensure that the teaching of writing was anchored to a really high-quality text and that grammar was taught at the point of reading and writing. We appreciated that following the plans would enable us to plot our children’s learning journey in English, from reception to Year 6 and to know that they had studied a good range of fiction and non-fiction texts from some of the best of contemporary and classic authors.
All staff have embraced the new plans. The hook to the book has been particularly successful and our lovely school has resounded to the sound of children receiving mysterious letters or following fabulous footprints, digging for artefacts or tasting tea. These experience lessons have given us an opportunity to drench our children in the vocabulary that they are about to encounter. This is not to say that we have stopped planning, far from it, but we now spend our time making the plans work for Sellincourt children. We adapt plans to ensure that all of our children can access the learning objective and we create independent writes at the end of each unit to provide children with an opportunity to apply the skills they have learned throughout the unit, to a similar task.
We have seen a marked increase in both the amount and range of writing that our children have produced this term and we are excited about continuing our writing development with Literacy Tree.
