Essential Literacy Key stage 1 and 2 contains 1000s of videos, animations, interactive activities, print activities, text resources, web links, lesson guides and lesson paths, all tagged to the Literacy Strategy, together with curriculum-related pictures, photos, maps and sounds.
Designed to support all areas of literacy teaching and learning, resources can be used with a whole class, with groups and individuals or a mixture of both during a lesson. |
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Videos and Animations | Videos and animations can be used as stimuli for further discussion and exploration of the ideas presented, to engage children in discussions or as starting points for particular activities, for example, creating a word bank. |
Michael Rosen: Performing Poetry Year 2
Real player video [7MB] |
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Goldilocks and the three bears: Year 1
Flash animation [7.3MB] |
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Videos and animations include:
Engaging pieces from a range of leading authors including Michael Rosen, Martin Waddell and Anne Fine reading their own work and discussing the writing process with young interviewers.
Performing poetry and plays.
Video footage with or without a voiceover to introduce a topic, to present a balanced argument or to provide an explanation.
Animations of traditional stories, poems, recounts and instructions. |
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Interactive Activities | The interactive activities support the teaching of mainly text level objectives from the Literacy Strategy. There are a number of titles that all work in the same way such as talking books, scene makers and performing poetry.
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Concrete Poetry Year 5
Flash Activity [849kB]
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The interactive activities can be used in a variety of ways:
For a whole class activity stimulating discussion, modelling ideas and developing writing styles, either as an introductory activity or during the main part of the lesson.
For a group or individual activity during the lesson, to develop key literacy skills or explore ideas.
In a plenary, to illustrate and share ideas, to consolidate learning and to support further discussion. |
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Lesson Guides | Lesson Guides
Lesson guides are based on literacy objectives for each group and can be printed and edited.
Examples:
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Print activities | Print activities are linked to key literacy objectives and to videos or interactive activities. They give pupils tasks to be completed, often in the form of a writing framework.
Examples:
Year 1 Term 2
 Print Partner
Year 5 Term 1
Print Partner
Teachers may want to use these in shared work sessions. For example, pupils may complete a 'Gathering information' print activity after watching a video and then discuss what has been noted.
They may also complete print activities while working individually or in groups with particular videos or interactive activities.
There are some print activities that can be used away from the computer to consolidate ideas introduced earlier. |
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Lesson Paths | Lesson paths are ready-made differentiated learning pathways, based on a Lesson guide.
They contain pupil-friendly instructions with resources, and have been created for use on a whiteboard during whole class sessions or by individuals and groups..
You can use and edit Lesson paths or create your own using the Lesson path editor tool.
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Text resources | Text resources include print versions of the stories and poems featured in the videos and interactive activities, story summaries, additional work by featured authors and poets, bibliographies, background information on fiction and non-fiction topics, and fact sheets.
They can be used when planning, to review content and identify text features. With a whiteboard, they can be annotated in the shared text, sentence or word level sessions and in the plenary. Pupils can refer to
them in independent
or group work. |
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Web-Links | Web-links to curriculum-based sites are provided. Some of the links are to sites used in the KnowledgeBox lesson guides and linked to specific literacy objectives.
Others are general and are listed by key stage.
An alert box appears each time a link is selected to remind users they are leaving KnowledgeBox. |
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Maps, Pictures and Photos | By using the advanced search function, you can draw on a huge bank of maps, pictures and photos which can be used creatively in teaching and learning.
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