Intentions:

• Raising standards

• Raising teacher awareness of what constitutes ‘good’ writing

• Raising teacher understanding of catering for different learning styles

• Making Literacy more enjoyable

Issues with the children’s writing at the beginning of the project:

• lack of imagination• little or no description• repetitive sentence structure• unadventurous vocabulary• poor punctuation• general dislike of Literacy• poor self esteem of some children

Perceptions were mixed but highly focused on the technicalities of writing: handwriting, discomfort etc.Children also said that they struggled with ideas for stories.

Study of camera angles

Evaluation of sound and colour

Writing effective scenes using ‘Zone of Relevance’

Conscience alley – Should Nemo touch the ‘but’?

We watched the scene in which Nemo and Dory had to escape from Bruce. On the big screen it caused a few gasps -followed by embarrassed giggles.

• Character description

• Setting description

• Conscience Alley

• Story writing –Writing an additional episode

• Freeze Frames

The children completed another Conscience Alley. This time they had to decide whether Harry and Ron should go to find Hermione.

As this was the children’s second experience of Conscience Alley, I chose one of the children to walk down the centre and make the decision.

‘Are we watching a film…I mean doing ‘Literacy’?’

‘I’ve learnt that you can write and it can be fun’

• Enthusiasm

• Participation

• Separation from ‘normal’ Literacy

• Quantity and quality of work

• Diary extracts

• Discussion – ‘Should Mulan go to war?’

Reading comprehension• Reading comprehension

• Writing a scene

• Play scripts focusing on relationships between characters

• Persuasive texts

• Interviews with characters

• News bulletins

Writing a play script based on the dinner table scene.The children planned another scene that could fulfil the same purpose as this scene. They thought about what the film maker might want the audience to know about the characters and their relationships with one another.

What changed?

• Children enjoyed Literacy more• Children’s creative writing became much more descriptive• More adventurous vocabulary was used• Children wrote more• Better group work

Why?

• Not seen as Literacy• Related to children’s areas of interest• Children began to see the purpose of description• Children really benefited from the amount of thinking/preparation time before final writing• Children began to understand the value of borrowing ideas –from films and each other• Children found the drama really helpful; it really allowed them to verbalise their ideas in preparation for writing.

The perceptions of writing hardly changed!

Why?

If children have believed for years that they are not good at writing, can their perceptions be changed in such a short period of time?

Did children disassociate Visual Literacy so much from their other writing that they were unable to relate to this as a success?

Could the implementation of Visual Literacy throughout the school help to prevent these negative perceptions of Literacy in the first place?