Literacy
Each week students will look at a particular literacy skill during tutor time and this will then be
consolidated during one of their English lessons, where they will look at the skill in more detail and
apply strategies to help them in their own extended writing.
The timetable below shows which focus your child will be studying each week for this half term:
Week beginning:
6th January
13th January
20th January
27th January
3rd February
10th February
Literacy Focus
Skimming
Scanning
Summarising
Apostrophes
Commas
Colons
The PowerPoint presentation, which is used during tutor time, can be accessed from this web page.
Please download the presentation and work your way through the activities with your child. This will
help them to consolidate their knowledge and recognise that these skills really do matter.
In addition to this, each week there is a WOW word (Word of the Week), and students are
encouraged to try and use these words in their own extended writing to build and extend their
vocabulary.
This week’s Word of the Week is:
Umbrage
Offence or annoyance.
"She took umbrage at his remarks"
Ideas for WOW at home:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Ask your child what the WOW means
Can they put the word into a sentence?
Can they use the word in any of their homework? (Not just English)
How many other words can they make, using only the letters from the WOW?
How many points would the word be worth if they put it down in a game of scrabble?
Subject Specific Spellings
Students are also given 8 spellings each week, which relate to a specific curriculum area. The
following week the students are given a spelling test by their tutor.
This week’s spellings to learn are: Geography
1. Continent
2. Urbanisation
3. Deforestation
4. Indigenous
5. Tectonic
6. Ordnance survey
7. Globalisation
Further links for extra literacy support:
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks3/
http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/
Literacy News:

Last half term students Jack Turgoose and Sophie Bastow (both year 7), took part in the
‘Descriptosaurus Writing Challenge’. They both attended extra- curricular sessions to
produce a piece of descriptive writing on any topic that they wished. This was then entered
into the National Literacy Trust’s ‘Descriptosaurus’ competition.

At the start of the new term a team of boys in year 7 will be selected for the Premier
Reading Stars programme, which will be run in school. We have been selected by the
National Literacy Trust to take part and it is a prestigious scheme that is sponsored by the
football Premier League!

A media competition for year 9 and an adventure book writing competition for year 7 will
run next half term alongside Engaging Education. This will focus on developing the literacy
skills of the students and excellent prizes are up for grabs!
Great Teen Books