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Lighting the Literacy Fire: Practical Ideas for the Organisation and Implementation of Comprehensive Literacy Teaching
This book emphasizes the teaching of practiced oral language and comprehension skills within the context of a complete literacy program.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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September 29, 2016
“Are we overestimating the power of data and underestimating the power of passion?” This is a question that was asked by Jill Eggleton sometime during the four-day institute that my colleagues and I attended. It is a good point. And Jill Eggleton does an excellent job writing high-interest books for children. HOWEVER, when I listened to her present and read her book, I had to remember that she is AGAINST timed reading, very AGAINST Dibels, and even more AGAINST the Common Core State Standards. Yet, those things are our reality. Still, I found many things about her program (or programme, as they write in New Zealand) that can be used under our current constraints in the U.S.
Her book had ideas for how to schedule your literacy block and what to do during it. It also had many lists and checklists for where kids should be in order to progress from level to level (by developmental level and general age level, not grade level). She also gave much information at the institute, and what I’m writing here has a mixture of information from both the book and the institutute.
One thing that I really liked was her idea for early writing. Have the students draw a picture, but it is NOT called a picture. It is called a PLAN. They are to LABEL their plan and write from it. The teacher then meets with student and has the student read the writing. The teacher makes a positive comment about the message and writes the sentence(s) correctly under the student’s writing. Eggleton also suggests that you make sure that the writing assignments have authentic purposes (she has a checklist for the types of writing to cover), and she suggests having older writers focus on a moment in time by “putting a magnifying glass over” the part of the story to write about.
With reading, she says to not to pull out vocabulary and not to focus on phonics first. This is different from what we learned in the literacy project, and it several title teachers in my study group objected to this, saying that it is important to pull out vocabulary first, especially for ELLs.
She has different ways of doing a lesson for each reading level. For emergent readers, you preview, view, and review the book. You read the book out loud together. During the preview, you ask a “What do you think…?” question. During the view, you stop after every page and ask students to “find the word(s) that [tell you something].” During the review, you ask open-ended questions that can elicit varied responses from the students. (This level and the other levels are written about in the “guided reading” section of her book.)
During the institute, Jill Eggleton pointed out,“ Practice is the best of all instructions.” She states on page 71 of her book, “Not everything the students read needs to have a response. The most valuable activity is to simply read.”
Her book had ideas for how to schedule your literacy block and what to do during it. It also had many lists and checklists for where kids should be in order to progress from level to level (by developmental level and general age level, not grade level). She also gave much information at the institute, and what I’m writing here has a mixture of information from both the book and the institutute.
One thing that I really liked was her idea for early writing. Have the students draw a picture, but it is NOT called a picture. It is called a PLAN. They are to LABEL their plan and write from it. The teacher then meets with student and has the student read the writing. The teacher makes a positive comment about the message and writes the sentence(s) correctly under the student’s writing. Eggleton also suggests that you make sure that the writing assignments have authentic purposes (she has a checklist for the types of writing to cover), and she suggests having older writers focus on a moment in time by “putting a magnifying glass over” the part of the story to write about.
With reading, she says to not to pull out vocabulary and not to focus on phonics first. This is different from what we learned in the literacy project, and it several title teachers in my study group objected to this, saying that it is important to pull out vocabulary first, especially for ELLs.
She has different ways of doing a lesson for each reading level. For emergent readers, you preview, view, and review the book. You read the book out loud together. During the preview, you ask a “What do you think…?” question. During the view, you stop after every page and ask students to “find the word(s) that [tell you something].” During the review, you ask open-ended questions that can elicit varied responses from the students. (This level and the other levels are written about in the “guided reading” section of her book.)
During the institute, Jill Eggleton pointed out,“ Practice is the best of all instructions.” She states on page 71 of her book, “Not everything the students read needs to have a response. The most valuable activity is to simply read.”
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