The Government’s national literacy framework, which sets out the blueprint for the literacy hour, will be sent to all primary schools next month. It provides a highly detailed structure for teaching the national curriculum’s reading and writing requirements, showing how children’s learning should progress and interweaving a wide range of elements in a term-by-term programme. It covers media education, historical literature and poetry as well as phonics, grammar and spelling.
The standard literacy hour has the following structure:
* whole-class work on a shared text: about 15 minutes
* whole-class focused work on spelling and grammar: about 15 minutes
* independent and guided group work: about 20 minutes
* whole-class plenary session reviewing and reflecting on what has been learned: about 10 minutes
The literacy framework is divided into three strands:
* phonics, spelling and vocabulary (word level work): this strand also includes handwriting
* grammar and punctuation (sentence level work)
* comprehension and composition (text level work): involves reading and writing a wide range of fiction, poetry and non-fiction
