model texts

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INTRODUCTION

Jocelyn: Hey Kirby, how are you going?

Kirby: Good. Thank you. How are you?

Jocelyn: I'm excellent now that you're here. It's so fantastic to have you here for our very first teacher talk episode of the podcast. Kirby, why don't you share with our listeners who you are, where you teach, what you do, how long you've been teaching for and all the things?

Kirby: Sure. So my name's Kirby. This will be my 12th year of teaching. I worked out earlier, wh…

I have said it many times and I’ll say it again.

 The simple fact is that our children don’t have enough time focusing on language at school.  Now I know that they talk to each other in the playground and that they talk in the classroom when you don’t want them to. I know that you are likely already doing some ‘talk to your partner’ in your classroom (if you aren’t, please do start) and that you are possibly engaging children in oral sentence level instruction.

Even with all these things goi…

 Once we understand the need for explicit language and writing teaching, the question becomes, “Exactly what does this look like in a classroom?”  This post aims to begin to answer that question.  

Quality picture books.

A particularly engaging and effective method of building language is through the use of quality picture books.  This is by no means a new way to explore and contextualise grammar.  I highly recommend Joanne Rossbridge and Kathy Rushton’s book “Convers…