Literacy Program for Schools and Parents

Designing a Literacy Program for Schools and Parents

November 18, 2020

What does it take to create and maintain a successful school literacy program? How do you engage the low achievers? Extend those with higher abilities? Help students to make it clear what they need to improve? How can I make Grammar and Punctuation ‘fun’? I found out not so long ago when I was frustrated at trying to find English activities that appealed to my students.

As a teacher and tutor, I was passionate about raising literacy and comprehension results, especially with boys.

1) Understanding Learners’ Needs

Learning is more enjoyable and rewarding when it is an active process. Our belief is that unless boys are engaged with the material they will not learn. Our LFB model relies on and revolves around the successful integration of 3 core elements:

a) Content which is targeted and relevant to the audience and will generate interest.

b) A delivery mode that that appeals to the user.

c) An education platform that can provide the learning outcomes.

Literacy For Boys operates on an engagement model which we call ‘LFB’.

Learner specific – Fun content – Boy centric

2) Understanding a School’s Needs

I spent a lot of time sifting through teaching/learning research, online programs, techniques and tools. I did not find a program that catered for students from Year 3 through to high school, that focussed on each of the core literacy areas. I set out to design a program that could be used by all teachers in a school and could:

provide instruction that targets the individual learning needs and potential of students
cover all literacy concepts – comprehension, grammar, spelling, punctuation
provide students, teachers, and parents with accurate, validated and centralised data that could be owned by students and used by teachers to plan teaching concepts
capture the students’ interest as they examine text, spelling and grammar and acquire skills in manipulating them.

3) Tracking, sharing and communicating data

An engaging literacy program with ‘cool’ topics was not enough by itself – it had to be supported by a data tracking system.

For students and parents, this meant it had to show what they were learning and why and how they were improving. As John Hattie (Professor and researcher in education) describes it: what am I doing; why am I doing it; and when will I know if I’m successful?

Reciprocally, a program should hold students accountable for their decline or lack of engagement.

For teachers, it meant that the data needed to be collated, centralised, and communicated easily, so that they could understand each student’s strengths and areas for literacy improvement. Analytics track each student’s literacy assessment data and summarises a student’s literacy competencies.

4) Evidence and results

The evidence speaks for itself. Independent trials in schools (using standardised testing prior and post using the program), showed that students (boys and girls) made an average improvement of 18 months in their reading, comprehension and spelling results after only 18 weeks on the program. Click here for data results. An average jump of 18 months after only two terms! 100% of our schools renewed their subscriptions for the 2020 year.

5) For Parents

Getting boys interested in doing their literacy homework is tough! It becomes an almost impossible task when a boy cannot relate to or is not interested in literacy activities. So with this in mind, Literacy for Boys developed material that boys will love.

There are many online learning platforms. Rarely are they focused on boys, their specific interests and how they learn. Boys learn differently. There is substantial research to support the learning difficulties boys encounter with literacy. Therefore, a tailored approach to literacy education is required.

Contact us

Looking for a new literacy program for your class or school? Students from Year 3 to 9 wanting extra practice with their comprehension, spelling, grammar and punctuation can enrol in our program Literacy for Boys.

Want a literacy program that you can use at home? Here is feedback from one of our parents:

“Your website is wonderful. I am so glad that I discovered it. Our two boys love the topics.” (Amelia)

Feel free to contact us info@literacyforboys.com.au to enrol for a FREE 2-week trial.