Breaking Down Literacy Strategies

Over the last couple of department meetings, we have had visits by Mr Marc Milford, the school's literacy specialist. We have looked at writing examples and worked on identifying some of the language features in those examples all together as a department.


After these sessions, Marc said that it would be a good idea fo each of us to sit with him on a one to one basis with examples from our own learning areas as we all teach such different parts of Technology.

I sat with Marc today and we looked at an excellence exemplar from standard AS91067. I wanted to focus on this one as the Year 11 students are working on this at the moment and are at the point where they need to analyse their design developments in order to move onto their final design.

I printed off the exemplar and stuck it into the middle of a big piece of paper so we could scribble notes all round it and highlight key points in the text.

I then transferred this rather untidy mess of thoughts into a Google Drawing. This was so that I could share it with students and print it out for the wall.

Link to drawing here

I then printed this out really big for the back wall on my classroom that I have recently cleared. I intend to also add subject specific vocabulary on this wall to join this large poster and sentence starters, joinings and help.

Marc is going to visit the class this week to work through another exemplar with them so they know what features they are looking for and what to include in their own written work about their designs.