Summer Series - What goes into an Upper Primary Literacy Block?

Hello there, and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, and today, we will be talking about the upper primary literacy block. For a long time, we have focused exclusively on what goes into the early years literacy block and upper primary teachers; it is your turn. 

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Transcript

00.00
Introduction
Well, hello there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, and today we are going to be talking all about the upper primary literacy block. For a very long time, we have focused exclusively on what goes into the early years literacy block and upper primary teachers, it is your turn.

00.24
What goes into an upper primary literacy block?
One of the questions in the Facebook group and other places is: exactly what should my literacy block look like in years three to six? And I have to say that finding the perfect literacy block can feel like chasing a magical unicorn through an enchanted forest so that you can make a wish. We fervently hope that we will succeed and that all of our problems will be solved when we achieve this goal. But the reality is that when it comes to literacy blocks, perfection is as achievable as finding that unicorn.
But never fear. That doesn't mean that all is lost and whether you are teaching early years or upper primary, there are absolutely guidelines around what to include to make sure that we are hitting all of the important points so that we can help move the needle on student outcomes.

01.23
Where should the needle be?
First up, I'm going to outline the ideal scenario for a year three to six literacy block, and then we'll shine a little bit of light on the harsh reality of what happens when we have to make decisions about supporting students who have not reached up a primary with the skills that they really need to.

Now to find a checklist of what we need to teach, we need to look no further than the Language Literacy Network from Learning by Design. This infographic has the strands of Scarborough's reading rope represented on the left with the same elements on the right related to writing. And the important contribution that this makes to our understanding is that we are building one central body of knowledge that we apply through both a reading and writing lens.

We are really used to thinking of our literacy block as being divided up into reading time and writing time. But I think a more useful perspective is to divide our time into top of the rope time and bottom of the rope time.

02.29
Top of the rope and bottom of the rope.
Now, top of the rope is really around the language, features and structures and the elements of text, and the bottom of the rope is around nuts and bolts. It's the decoding and encoding. The automaticity that comes with repeated practice at word level. So just to recap that, I'll say it again because it can be a little different to get our head around instead of thinking about your literacy block as being a reading time and a writing time, perhaps think about it as being a time where I'm building the nuts and bolts foundational skills and understandings that we see in our phonics and our decoding and our spelling, and then the top of the rope. The other time is we're building out rich language experiences very often through a gorgeous, rich text.

03.16
In an ideal world.
In the upper primary, our ideal scenario is that our time is spent refining and developing the top of the rope for both reading and writing. We're enhancing knowledge and skills in vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, pragmatics and literacy knowledge. And, of course, we are building background knowledge to use as we read and write.

But I have to say that a focus on these top strands doesn't mean that everything is only ever done in context. Every new thing we teach needs to be taught following an explicit teaching model where we build the field, and make sure children are gently led into understanding what we are doing so that they can come along on the journey. We model and deconstruct, engage in joint construction, and provide the opportunity for supported practice. Not just in one lesson, but across as many lessons as it takes for students to develop fluency and sound understanding of all of the concepts that we are teaching.

04.18
That's nice, Jocelyn, but can you just tell me what to put in the literacy block?
For most skills and areas of knowledge, it's a good idea to break them down into small parts and then increase the context in which the students work as fluency and automaticity develop. An example of this is syntax. As we introduce a new element, we teach it on its own before combining it with other things, and eventually expect the children to use these concepts in paragraphs and texts that they write themselves. and you might be thinking, well, that's nice, Jocelyn, but can you just tell me what to put in the literacy block? Well, yes, of course I can.

Now in The Resource Room, we have planning and assessment sections, and there are plans there with outlines of what your block might look like, guiding you into some of the decisions that you need to make. We'll put a link to that in the show notes for you.

The specific parts of the block that you'll need to consider, are, of course, daily review that involves retrieval practice. It involves repeated, supported practice of the skills and knowledge that we have been teaching. This goes on for each concept for as long as students need. It's not a one-and-done; Well, I taught it on Monday, and I  rehearsed it and retrieved it on Tuesday, and now we're finished. The research evidence around this, and I'm gonna refer to Stanislas Dehaene's work in his book, How We Learn, and there's lots of other books that talk about this Powerful Teaching is another one, involves practising content that we've just learned that we learned a week or two ago, that we learned a few weeks ago, and that we learned in the first half of the year if we're now in the second half. So we want that spaced practice over time, which is highly effective in helping children retain what we are teaching into the long term.

06.05
Making the switch from phonics and decoding to spelling/morphology.
We need to include some sort of word work. Now, in the early years, this will be our phonics and decoding lesson, but in upper primary, this focus switches usually to a spelling approach. Now, for me, this is where morphology comes in. So a morphology-based approach to spelling is highly effective. It also has great evidence around its impact on students who are struggling readers. So talk about bang for our buck, we're going to extend our students to understand how words work every single student, and we're also going to positively impact our students who may need a little bit of extra help. And again, inside the resource room, we have lessons ready to go there for you that are taught across a four-day sequence with a gradual release model. We teach a morpheme, then we put it into a sentence orally just to talk about. We look at its role,  in connecting with parts of speech. This is not something done in isolation.  We look at parts of speech in sentences. We read words, we break words apart. We put words back together, and we read texts containing those target morphemes, and those are all in The Resource Room, ready to go for you.

Now, if you're thinking, well, I've heard these elements represented before, there's a good reason for that, and that's because those are the elements that research indicates,  lots of word breaking, lots of word building, thinking about the meaning of different parts of words, extending that out to use for comprehension. That is what we should be seeing from a morphology-based spelling approach.

07.38
We need repeated oral reading.
We need repeated oral reading. And what that does is it builds fluency, but it also helps us build knowledge. So that repeated reading could be something related to the science you are teaching or the HASS you are teaching. It could be that little morphology-based reading passage, that I just spoke about.  It could be a poem, it could be anything but try and connect it to some other area of learning so that you get bang for your buck.

08.05
What about handwriting?
We do need to be teaching handwriting as well as some vocab follow-up. Why do we need to teach handwriting? Well, because as people who teach older students know, not every child comes to upper primary with firm letter formation. Now, my understanding is that by the time they get to year three, if they don't have great letter formation in print, the horse is bolted, so in a lot of schools, that looks like cursive writing, and that can be a really great thing.

08.30
Sentence work.
We need to do some explicit sentence work that might involve teaching new aspects of syntax.  It could be sentence combining for practice. It could be working on Prosody or prosody, depending on how you say it around phrasing and expression of sentences. But some sort of explicit sentence work is a really good thing to include because we know that sentences are the building blocks of all of our writing.

08.56
Text-based units
Text-based units form the substantive work, I think, done in the context of a rich text. We're going to teach comprehension this way. This is a huge question that comes up.  We could have another five podcast episodes all about comprehension, but basically, how do we teach and assess comprehension? Through helping children engage in rich text. We have been told that we find the level of the student and we find a text that matches to their level. There is no research evidence to support that. Instead, what the research indicates is that we need to be providing texts that are a little more tricky than the child can handle on their own.

Now we don't just throw it at them and then expect them to manage it. We need to guide them. So when we're engaging in novel studies, short stories, poetry, whatever it happens to be, the teacher needs to be at the front of the room. The teacher needs to be guiding students, and it's so important that all students have access to engage with rich text.

We can't deny age-appropriate rich text to students just because their decoding is not at a point where they could tackle this on their own. We need to provide adjustments that enable them to engage with the language and the text structures and the age-appropriate thinking in English.

Now, in an ideal world, that's actually not needed,  because everybody comes to you in year 3, 4, 5, and six, with their phonics knowledge fully developed and their decoding and writing capacity well on the way. But the reality is that at some point, we may well find ourselves needing phonics. How much we need will depend on whether the students are consolidating or learning.

10.42
Are your strugglers consolidating or starting from scratch?
Now, if they're consolidating, if they've learned this and they're just a bit wobbly, and you'd like them to be a bit fluent and automatic, that's actually good news because you can achieve that in a number of different ways. With your daily review, you can link your handwriting with your phonics. So if you're teaching cursive writing and you are teaching the grapheme AI or the different ways to write I, you can make those graphemes the focus of your handwriting. Let's look at how we connect these letters, and we can embed it there. Of course, really strong targeted homework practice is a fun thing to do as well, and there are other ways to consolidate.

But if learning is needed from scratch, if the children are coming to you and they're looking at those various representations of the phoneme A, and they're looking at you blankly and guessing wildly, then they need learning from scratch, and some decisions need to be made about how much time we spend on this thing, who does it, what it looks like in the ecosystem of our classroom. Now, much of these decisions depend on school resourcing, and by that, I mean people. The stuff is not hard to come by, it's the people that makes the big difference, the level of need of the students and, in fact, how many students need this instruction. If you're a year three teacher and three-quarters of your class have come to you without these strong foundations, then that's going to look quite different from if you're a year three teacher and only two out of your 25 kids need this.

It's so important to remember that students will not achieve fluency in reading or writing without foundational skills, and if students need this learning,  they need it and they deserve to have it. The challenge comes in, though, when you're an upper primary teacher with all this pressure to teach the upper primary content, and you feel pulled in five different directions because you can see what these children need, but you don't have time to do it, and you're on your own in that.

And I think that asking any upper primary teacher to manage tier three intervention on their own is an unrealistic and unfair ask.  Schools need to have a plan around this that needs to be collective. There needs to be a common approach, and upper primary children still need access to the rich learning that they need in the whole rest of the reading rope. So when this happens, that's a school-level decision, but let's not take children out of the text-based unit time to give them phonics because they're gonna miss out on that higher level stuff.

13.19
Could you break all this down for me?
You'll find a breakdown of the upper primary literacy block on our website, and there'll be a link to that in the description for this episode for you. And as I've mentioned, if you're a resource room member, there are planning documents and actually, all the things you need to get going with structured literacy in upper primary, including text-based units, morphology-based spelling, all the phonic stuff for the kids who need catch up lessons in syntax, lessons in parts of speech, and all of the things. We're adding to these resources all the time, so if you think of something you need, please do let us know.

13.51
You won't be perfect, but you won't break the children either.
And finally, I want to leave you with this thought; wrapping your head around a structured literacy block is less about being able to make a plan on paper than it is around feeling confident and fluent with the teaching routines and structures of explicit teaching. You won't become fluent without practice. You won't develop confidence without taking action and seeing things come together with your own eyes. You won't be perfect the first time you teach a morphology-based spelling lesson or the second time you stand at the front and guide students through a complex text. You won't even be perfect in this the third time or the fourth time. But you also won't break the children as you develop this fluency and proficiency in teaching this way.

Find things that support you. If that's from the resource room, that's awesome. If it's not, that is awesome as well. The goal is that you are all supported to teach children to read and write well. All the way through school. So wherever you find the tools to do that, if that's serving your purpose, if it's doing what it needs to, then that's great. We've got some stuff for you also that you might like to look at.


Conclusion
Please remember that something, evidence-informed, done imperfectly, will always be better for children than something not evidence-informed, done with full fidelity, you are going to be okay. You will not break the children. Don't try and do everything at once, just take it step by step. 

If it were me, I'd start with a daily review and that morphology-based spelling work, because that's taught as low variance every week. You do it the same way. Get confident with that, and then move into that text-based work and the explicit teaching around syntax. Whatever step you are up to in this, I want to say happy teaching everyone. The fact that you're listening to this podcast means that you are on the road already, and all will be well.

See you next episode.