Writing – Page 5 – Jane Farrall Consulting

Word Walls: Using the Word Wall

Feb 1, 201712 Comments

Last month I wrote about getting your word wall ready for use. Now they are ready – we need to use them. There is no point having a word wall that you don’t use! Word Walls are an important resource for conventional readers and writers. Our job, as educators, is to teach them how helpful

Comprehensive Literacy Instruction: Meeting the Instructional Needs of ALL Students in our Classrooms

Nov 21, 20152 Comments

Many of the schools that I work with have been consistently implementing good, comprehensive literacy instruction for some time – and as a result there are a greater number of conventional readers and writers in our schools. This has led to an increased need for differentiation in our classrooms, and for more teachers to provide

Writing in Our Classrooms

Jun 22, 20153 Comments

Chloe re-writing a favourite book from Tar Heel Reader Writing is a complex task, involving ideas, language, words, spelling and transcribing or selecting letters. We need to teach all of these skills – and eventually students need to be able to do all of these, within the one task, to become writers. Overall guidelines Do

Keedogo & Keedogo Plus: Custom Keyboards for the iPad

Oct 26, 20145 Comments

Recently Apple released iOS8 – and once again there were a number of accessibility features added with this update. For a round up of accessibility changes and additions check out the excellent summary from AbleNet – iOS8 Accessibility. One of the new features is the ability for developers to create their own onscreen keyboards for

ISAAC 2014 Handouts

Aug 6, 2014

The ISAAC 2014 Conference in Lisbon was fabulous! Big congratulations to the Conference Co-Chairs, Luis Azevedo, Margarida Nunes da Ponte, Pedro Encarnação and Isabel Amaral. Also a big thanks and congratulations to ISAAC, the organisers and everyone involved, including the amazing volunteers who were such good hosts. For those of you who attended my sessions

Letter Writing: Writing for Real Reasons

Apr 4, 2014

Writing is a very complex task in literacy. It has many components. Whenever we write, we need to think of an idea, then think of the language to describe the idea, then we need to think of the words and how we spell them – and finally we have to think about how we are

Too late to learn to read & write? No!

Dec 16, 20138 Comments

Last week I had a wonderful experience. I’ve been smiling ever since. Then yesterday I read a blog post by David Koppenhaver and decided that I needed to write about my experience. One of my favourite quotes is from Dr David Yoder. “No student is too anything to be able to read and write.” I

Literacy Lab: a great tool for quality literacy instruction

Jun 18, 20135 Comments

Please note: this resource has been discontinued. Literacy Lab is a fabulous piece of software for use as part of balanced literacy instruction from Mayer Johnson. The software is aimed at emergent readers and writers, providing a range of simple, easy to use highly motivating activities. I have been using it for a few weeks

Predictable Chart Writing: Group Writing for All

Jun 6, 201315 Comments

Recently I have been talking a lot to teachers about doing group writing in their classroom. As teachers implement a balanced literacy program in their classrooms, it is important that writing happens daily – and that writing happens for real reasons. Writing is one of the most complex tasks that we ask students to do.

Favourites and Collections – Creating bookshelves in Tar Heel Reader

Apr 16, 20133 Comments

This is my third blog post about the new look Tar Heel Reader. I am finding these new features so useful – and I hope you are too. In this post I’m going to focus on Favourites and Collections – both of which are great ways to store and share groups of books in Tar