Lighting the Literacy Fire

A million years ago when I was on my first practicum at Cornwall Park Primary School in Auckland, I was lucky enough to see Jill Eggleton take a few of their staff meetings about literacy.  And that was when I fell in love with her and her literacy approach.  As literacy leader at a previous school, I ordered a lot of her books for the students as they have strong language and engage the kids.

Recently I have been talking with a junior teacher at our school who is doing a masters in literacy and she reminded me about Jill's book Lighting the Literacy Fire .
I had read the first version of this book ages ago when I was still at teachers college so it was about time that I read the new version again, particularly because I am changing to a year level I haven't taught in years.

I actually got a lot more out of it then I thought I would.  It basically tells you how to set up your literacy programme to ensure that you have a good oral language programme, writing programme and reading programme.  Of course I was doing a lot of these things already but there were things that I was reminded about - like the current events shared reading (I am totally doing that next year).

The writing programme chapter had some good tips about 'writing with' students so I have recorded some ideas that I would like to implement next year and that I will hopefully blog about on here then.

This book is definately worth a read or a re-read.  I got a lot out of it and I can see how all of the Jill Eggleton reading resources tie in to her approach.  We have her resources in the school so I am looking forward to using them with my new year 4 class.