Visual Literacy
Raising Boys Achievement in
Writing
By Ann Bashir-Pugh
St. Benedict’s Infant School
Reception Class
Who are we?
• We are a six-form entry infant school.
Each class has 25 children.
• Within the Foundation Unit there is a
Children’s Centre, a nursery and six
Reception classes. Year 1 and 2 are based
in a different building.
• 96 percent of our children are either
Pakistani or Bengali and 4 per cent are
Somalian
• All of our children have English as an
additional language.
My aims for the Project:
For the children:
•To motivate the children when they are writing
•To raise children’s self esteem/confidence in speaking
and listening
•To make literacy more enjoyable
For me:
•To enhance my own teaching
For the school:
To address boys and Bengali children who are
underachieving
How did I get started:
• Firstly, I looked the examples of the
children’s writing and thought about what
they needed to do in order to develop it.
• I also looked at the perception tests to
find out what kind of reading and writing
the children liked to do.
What did the perception tests tell
me:
• For writing: The children said that they liked
to write about their families and things that
they did at school, for example, writing their
name or writing numbers.
• For reading: Animals was the most favourite
thing that the children said they liked to read
about. Other things they enjoyed reading
about were cars, fairy tales, dolls and children.
Unit 1 - Little Wolf
• I chose this film because it draws on
the elements of traditional tales
which was the genre that we, the
Reception unit, were using to support
our teaching and learning
So what did we do?
•Hearts and Minds - to establish what the characters
were thinking and saying
•Matched words to those written in speech and thought
bubbles - to discriminate between letters, words and
sentences
•Created sounds to accompany actions seen in the short
film
•Illustrated the three rescue scenes, put them in the
correct order and wrote an explanation for each attempt.
•Thought about and illustrated an alternative rescue
attempt and wrote an explanation of it.
And we did…
•Role on the Wall - to establish what we knew about wolves.
This was based on the short film and from non-fiction
information found on-line and also footage of a wolf tour,
which was also found on-line
•Role Play - to re-enact what happened at the beginning,
middle and end of the film
•Freeze Frame - photographed and used to sequence the
film and add a caption to illustrate what happened in each
frame
•Hot Seating - to establish the sheep’s point of view
•Zig-zag books - to illustrate and record the sequence of
events
•Hand puppets - of Little Wolf
Unit 2 - The Jungle Book
• I chose this film because one of our
summer term topics is all about animals
and we also have a planned school visit
to Twycross Zoo in the summer term
So what did we do?
Settings
•Looked at how films are made by using storyboards and
at how cartoons are animated
•Real vs. pretend - looked at similarities and differences
and which setting was more interesting and why
•Zones of Relevance - to ascertain which words describe
how we felt about the jungle scenes
•Features of the jungle - outline drawn and labelled by
the children
•Jungle vs. village - compared the jungle with the ‘man’
village
And we did...
•Points of view - we found out, through questioning, other
people’s views on snakes
•Like vs. dislike - analysed responses and decided on which
statements illustrated a likeness and which a dislike to
snakes
•Characterisation - to establish what snakes are like; how
they move; how they communicate; do we trust them;
•‘Snake shape’ word bank - using words that we thought
characterised the snake
And finally we did...
•Role on the wall - to establish what we knew and found
out about tigers.
•Role-Play - to re-enact what happened at the beginning,
middle and end of the film
•Hot seating - to find out what Mowgli missed in the jungle
The End Result:
• The children are motivated - they are all fully engaged
with the activities that we do. Even the adults enjoy the
activities and are keen to do the next session.
• The children’s self confident in speaking and listening has
increased incredibly - not just in Literacy but in all areas
of learning.
• The vocabulary used by the children is more
sophisticated and this is having an impact on their writing
• The children are now more confident at thinking about
what to write.
• They read and write through segmenting and blending
more independently and with confidence.
• As a consequence of this project, literacy is now enjoyed
by the children and the adults!!