About the Literacy Hour

The Literacy Hour at Key Stage 1 is designed to provide a practical structure dedicated to teach reading and writing skills to children within the age range of 5 to 7.

The framework is as follows:

15 minutes whole class shared reading or writing. Shared reading would preferably be with a big book that the whole class reads together. To see the books click on Literacy Hour Books. Shared writing could be writing a class poem, story, letter or contents page index or any text that is relevant to the class.

15 minutes phonic work. This again is done with the whole class. This could involve spelling, correcting sentences with capital letters and full stops, playing games with puppets to correct grammar and punctuation, cvc work (consonant, vowel consonant eg. Sounding out letters such as d-i-g or r-a-t) to get children to decode the sounds and put them together to make a word. This is called phoneme work.

20 minutes on task work. The teacher will either be teaching reading or writing skills with a group of children. Depending on class sizes there are usually 4 to 5 groups of children. The other groups will be working independently or with a classroom assistant on a task that is related to what they have been reading or writing in the previous 30 minutes.

10 minutes plenary. The whole class comes together to discuss and review their activities and learning. If appropriate they discover ways of enhancing and elaborating on what they have understood in their learning process.