Foundations For Literacy

[jowhiley]

Hello,

Is anyone using foundations for literacy (sue palmer and ros Bayley), I just really wanted to know how you incorporate it into your planning and what format your plans take?

I'd be really grateful to hear from anyone as it seems like an excellent scheme-any info gratefully recieved!

jo

[mundia]

sorry Jo, must have missed your poast somewhere along the line. We started using FoL this year and we introduced as a focus the learnign to listen and time to talk, in line with school SDP focus on speaking and listening. We hope to buld on that next year (althoguh our new coordinator deosant approve so we shall see). One member of staff went on the course, if you get the chance, its well worth it. We did short INSETS with the FS staff covering each part. We completede the audit as a team, and looked at the things we felt we were not covering well and focussed on those. We put an FoL column in our planning (which we call CLL/FoL) and then broke that down into the 7 areas. Im not sure if we will continue with this next year.

WE laminated vocabulary sheets on which we write up focus vocab for each week and out that up in every room as well as outdoors (we have 100% EAL).

You will find that many of the things in the book you arec doing already, we found that we were, it just helped to focus our attention more. We have been looking at the PREPARE to develop expressive language.

 

We are finding it excellent and I wil be very disappointed if we have to drop it next year after all the work we have done.

[Marion]

We just started using FoL but as Mundia says most of it is what we were already doing but it does help to focus in on what you are doing. We were already using lots of the Ros Bailey listening materials Beat baby Lola the listening leopard etc as this is an area we recognise our children struggle with.

We plan to do a half termly audit.

To be honest we skipped the literacy co ordinator and went directly to the head (hes more clued to FS) and hope to expand it into Y1 next year.

 

We dont do any special planning other than our planning incorporates the FoL rainbow (listening, talk, music, storytime, print, phonics and writing) some of these may not be in the literacy plan as we may be talking about a cooking activity or what we built in construction music may be singing number rhymes in numeracy print is in all areas of the curriculum as is writing.

[jowhiley]

Thanks so much for that, I will definitely try and get on the training, and like you say much of it we are already doing in our day to day practice, it's good to know how others have tackled it in planning.

 

Jo

[Sue R]

I have recently acquired my own copy - am now eagerly awaiting return to work next week, to put some of the ideas into practice. Thanks to Susan and mundia who first brought this publication to my attention - can't think how I managed without it for so long!!

 

Sue