The Launch of Mixed-Age Planning

We are incredibly proud of how the Literacy Tree platform is developing and expanding, and behind the scenes we are working hard to make sure our offer meets the needs of all our schools and teachers.  As our Writing Roots are pitched at end of year objectives to allow schools to choose where they position texts across the year, they need adaptation to suit the needs of a class at any given point in the year.  We are firm advocates of teachers, as the experts in the children they teach, owning the planning for their classes and personalising it to meet their needs, following the strong and sequenced backbone of the Teach Though a Text journey our Writing Roots provide.  With our growing number of small schools and those with mixed-age classes, and with some of the team having taught in these settings prior to joining Literacy Tree, we appreciate the pressures and challenges they present.    The range of attainment within a single-age class can be staggering, let alone when that range transfers to teaching two or three different year groups within one class.  As such, to add to the existing and popular offer of our mixed-age curriculum maps, we have now launched our newest addition to the platform - Mixed Age Planning (or MAPs).  These have been designed to provide support to structure personalised planning and adaptive teaching whilst also reducing workload and teachers’ cognitive load when planning for mixed-age classes.  
 
The MAPs are, as the name suggests, designed with mixed-age classes in mind, drawing on objectives from the adjacent year groups.  That being said, we also know the MAPs are already being used to help teachers plan for personalisation within a single year group too, particularly at this early point in the year.  The MAPs are not separate plans to the main Writing Root, but are located at the end of the resource and designed to be used to complement the whole class teaching taken from the main Root. They work by layering the independent work section of the session plans in order to scaffold, prompt, support and challenge children to meet the required standards and to engender depth in a variety of spelling, grammar and composition objectives as well as within application.  The aim is for the mixed-age suggestions to be manageable when teaching a mixed-age class to allow children to stay on the same journey within the same text and context, without the need for separating the class into year groups or to ‘split’ the sessions (though at times, of course you may wish to do this). 
 
The suggestions are designed to draw on adjacent year group objectives from the year above and below, as well as providing scaffolds to access the higher year group task or deepening learning from previous years to underpin our spiral curriculum approach by regularly revisiting previously taught objectives.   Our suggestions will, of course require additional adaptation to pitch them for the specific children you teach, but they should provide a starting point and a framework to work from.  Years 1-5 include suggestions for the adjacent year groups either side.  In addition, Year 1 MAPs include continuous provision suggestions to support mixed-age classes with Reception children, but could be equally useful for teachers considering transition between Reception and Year 1.  Reception Roots have suggestions for Years 1 and 2, and Year 6 Roots have suggestions for both Year 4 and 5, though we have noted down where a Year 6 text may not be recommended for use with Year 4 children.  Simply download the latest copy of the Writing Root from our website and scroll to the end of the plan to see the MAP suggestions – the texts which have them will be easily identifiable by the ‘Mixed Age Planning’ banner on the screen.  At present, we have developed the MAPs for all the texts on our Autumn curriculum maps, and our consultants will be working hard behind the scenes to continue to add to these throughout the year to complete the offer to include all the texts on our curriculum maps.   
 
We look forward to hearing how you use the mixed-age plans to support personalisation within your schools, whether you are in a mixed-age setting or not, and are always looking for feedback and suggestions about how we can further develop our offer.  Our Small Schools Forum is a central point of contact for this so if you are a member of a small school, do get in touch if you’d like to join us on these termly catch-ups. Happy planning!