Literacy with Miss P

Hello everyone, it’s finally here! For those who have been patiently waiting for this to be released, I do apologise. My Literacy Calendar is a little late this year for a couple of reasons. First, I have been busier than usual – adapting to teaching during lockdown and then returning to school with a bubble. Second, the majority of events and festivals have been cancelled so far this year and I wanted to give those organisations time to plan ahead for next year too.

I know that many of you use the Literacy Calendar to help you plan in opportunities to celebrate reading and writing across the school so I do hope it’s not too late! I started the Literacy Calendar a couple of years ago because I always found myself in a position where I found out about events, competitions and special days a little too late and we were always rushing to cobble something together. I wanted to be proactive rather than reactive and I wanted to ensure no opportunities were ever missed again! I also wanted our literacy team and teachers to adopt a strategic approach to celebrations and events and that they were no longer last minute affairs.

I’ve always felt it would be one of those things that’s incredibly useful to have and to share with staff, yet something we rarely have time to research or create! It proved so popular amongst the wider teaching community that I’ve have been creating and sharing the calendar annually ever since! I do hope it will inspire meaningful, purposeful, enjoyable writing and reading in your schools too!

This year, the calendar includes a mixture of writing and reading competitions, events, days, weeks, festivals and shadowing schemes suitable for primary pupils. Each event has a date (as accurate as it could be at the time of making!), blurb about the event, weblink and twitter handle or hashtag. Once again, I’ve also included some key children’s book award dates, as it’s always good to keep an eye out for new and exciting quality texts to use within the classroom. As a new addition this year, I’ve also included some suggested activities.

I hope that these easily digestible diary dates will enable you and your school to promote literacy and engage children in a plethora of exciting reading and writing for pleasure activities. I do not expect everyone to participate in everything, but rather teachers can pick and choose what would suit their class, school or curriculum topic throughout the year.

I have decided to share the Literacy Calendar with everyone – for FREE! This year, I have included a PDF and a word document so that you may tweak it to suit your own settings. All I ask is that you please give credit when shared.

I wish all of you wonderful teachers and educators the relaxing Summer break you deserve! We’ve earned it!

Miss P x

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE NOW!

Lastly, I’m also including a link to this excellent Literacy Calendar for Secondary Schools shared by Miss Howard on Twitter – thank you for taking inspiration from this and extending the calendar to include KS3 and KS4 opportunities!

I am sure I’ve missed something so do feel free to let me know in the comments below!