Thursday 8th September marks the worldwide celebration of International Literacy Day. For over 50 years, International Literacy Day has been celebrated annually around the world to remind us of the importance of basic reading and writing skills.
Since 1967, huge progress has been made in terms of advancing literacy across the globe. However, there are still 771 million illiterate people around the world. In the past 2 years, efforts to advance the literacy agenda have been further hampered by the pandemic. It is more essential than ever that we, as educators, ensure that no one is left behind. Highlighting the importance of literacy is crucial.
This year’s theme focuses on the need to transform and enrich existing learning spaces. It is a perfect opportunity for us to look at our school grounds, particularly our outdoor spaces, and consider how we can utilise them in the most effective ways to maximise learning for our children.
Story Strings:
Story Strings are an ideal activity to encourage pupils to consolidate their knowledge of a familiar story, recalling key events and practising their storytelling skills.
- Read a short and familiar tale to the children – one with various characters and settings would work well, such as The Three Little Pigs.
- Ask children to collect a selection of materials for use in their story – sticks, grass, leaves, stones. They will also need a pebble for each of the main characters.
- Lay a piece of string out for each child/group.
- Read the story again. As you read, the children can add their materials along the string to represent the words and action, moving their character pebbles along with them.
- Once the children have their completed story string, ask them to practise recalling the story themselves.
Bringing Leaves to Life with Language:
A simple pile of leaves offers so many opportunities for vocabulary development and using descriptive language. Have a go at this activity as a class to bring leaves to life!
- Ask each child to collect a leaf and bring it back to the group.
- Give each child 2 minutes to write down as many adjectives as they can to describe their leaf. Encourage them to be as adventurous as they can and think outside the box! What does it feel like? How does it smell? Does it have a sound?
- Each child must share one of their adjectives with the group. Children must listen to the other adjectives – if they repeat a word that has already been said, they are out of the game!
- The last child who is able to contribute new adjectives is the winner – and you will have a fantastic bank of natural adjectives to use in the future!
Playtime Game Instruction Writing:
Inventing, creating, writing instructions for, and playing new playtime games is a great way to get children learning outside this International Literacy day, while ensuring they have a lot of fun too!
- Start the session by playing a number of playtime games together. Some examples might be: skipping games, hopscotch, or tag.
- As a class, discuss what make these games suitable for playing outside. What are the rules for each game?
- Split your class into small groups, and give them ten minutes to generate their own game. Encourage them to keep it simple!
- Give children a clipboard and some guidance for writing instructions for their game. For example: what equipment is needed? How many people can play? What are the step-by-step instructions? How do you win?
- Once children have completed their instructions, ask them to swap with another group who will use their instructions to play the game.
- Groups can then give feedback based on the quality of the instructions.
- Keep the instructions and have them available at play times and lunch times as examples of new activities!
Corners
Corners is a very simple game that can be used to consolidate any grammatical concepts. This example uses word classes as its basis.
- Label each corner of the playground with a word class: noun, adjective, verb, adverb.
- Children stand in the middle of the playground.
- Ask the children to run to the correct word class when you call out a word.
International Literacy Day will hopefully prompt us to think more carefully about how we can transform our own spaces within schools – and perhaps consider how we can make these changes a more permanent part of the curriculum.
International Literacy Day: Four Ways to Transform your Outdoor Spaces was written by Natalie Wilcox
