The Thinking through text package aims to increase teachers subject knowledge of literacy and how thinking skills can both enhance the literacy learning and improve children’s thinking skills for life.
Teachers will learn how to introducing thinking skills strategies into the teaching sequence of a unit.
Phase 1 gives the children the opportunity to enjoy and explore the book/s, film and/or stimulus which will form the backbone of the unit. They enjoy an experience from which they draw personal responses and emotions. Through effective techniques, children become critical readers, not just evaluating what they read, but understanding the effects the writer has created, but how they have been created. They make links between their own experiences and the experiences within the text.
Supporting strategies:
- Talking Text – Positive reading involves becoming engaged in the story, as well as deepening understanding and appreciation through drama, art, music, dance, research and, of course, discussion, in which children talk their way towards deeper comprehension.
- Making connections, odd one out
Phase 2 gives the children the opportunity to develop and collect ideas and plan for the written outcome. Children will begin to shape ideas, orally and/or in writing.
Supporting strategies:
- Text mapping – Builds valuable banks of language and narrative patterning which can be incorporated into later writing. Text Mapping can be used as a visual tool to support the retelling and can be used to create ‘original’ stories.
- Role Play and Drama – To promote high-quality thinking, discussion and written outcomes, drama and role play can be used to explore ideas from reading and develop further ideas for children’s own writing.
- Creative thinking, enquiry, problem solving,
- What if?
Phase 3 The children build on planning to produce a final written outcome, modelled and supported by the teacher.
Supporting strategies:
- Talking text – Applying the same understanding when making choices about planning, creating and improving one’s own writing; understanding what response the children, as writers, wish to elicit in the reader.
- Evaluating
- Decision making
