If you’ve been following my blog or Instagram, you’ll know I returned to Ireland in the summer of 2019, so learning about the Primary Language Curriculum was new to me too. Having attended the day course with the PDST and engaging in a half-day webinar, I’ll be sharing my initial thoughts on the Primary Language Curriculum and how I intend to use it in my classroom.
Initial thoughts on the Primary Language Curriculum
It is very vague! I find the expectations and objectives incredibly vague with regards to planning and teaching. But below I’ll go through what I’ve taken from it.
Download this document here!The screenshot above is from the curriculum online which basically states that children should be immersed in a text type/genre in reading, writing, oral language and SESE. Basically, they need complete exposure before they are expected to write in a particular genre of writing.
While I agree whole heartedly with that idea, I find the curriculum can be interpreted in many different ways! Where are the objectives that help us realise what a 2nd class child should be working towards? Where are the objectives to show expectations for reading comprehension in 2nd class?
I know and understand no child is the same and that expectations should and will be altered, depending on the class. But even so, I feel the curriculum could be much more helpful if we knew a guide of what the expectations were for an average 2nd class student or whatever. If the children aren’t at that expectation, it doesn’t matter, but at least the teacher could then look to the year below or two years below and see what expectation they could teach to for that particular cohort.
How I’ve adapted my teaching to reflect the Primary Language Curriculum
As many of you know, I use Whole Class Guided Reading to explicitly teach reading skills to the children. See this post and this post for more information. By explicitly teaching reading skills to children, they are being fully immersed in a text type and can understand the INTENT of the the text type before they even attempt to write in this genre themselves. By linking my Reading and Writing lessons, I believe I’m teaching to the Primary Language Curriculum as children are developing a solid understanding and interest in the following areas:
This image was taken from the curriculum online- find it here.
Linking Reading and Writing to SESE has also been extremely helpful for fitting everything in. We all know how hard it is to for everything in to the teaching day. I previously posted about how I fit everything in to a Literacy lesson- find it here. See below how I linked Literacy to SESE- our Science topic was about birds of Ireland.
We were learning about report writing in Reading and Writing, but linked it to Birds of Ireland. These reports were the product of a month’s worth of lessons. (To download the MONTH of plans and resources, click here)
In Reading:
We read a range of reports and looked at
- Report Language/Vocabulary
- Effective layout and WHY an author might choose that particular layout.
- Purpose of the text type etc.
In Writing:
We took what we learned from Reading and engaged in drama, drawing a text map for a report and “magpying” good language to use for our own reports. This way, Oral Language and Writing are linked together making lessons more purposeful and progressive in terms of children’s understanding of a particular text type.
This strategy is from Talk 4 Writing by Pie Corbett, which appears to be IDEAL for adhering to the Primary Language Curriculum. If interested in learning more about this strategy, I HIGHLY recommend buying this book. It’s a key part of my planning and has been invaluable to children’s language learning, writing and general motivation in Literacy.
In SESE:
We used our research skills to gather information on Birds of Ireland to provide factual information for our reports. This way, children were getting the content of Birds of Ireland, but also USING that content to write a report. The link between all of the lessons set children up TO succeed and if that’s the aim of this Primary Language Curriculum- great!
To link in STEM as well, we made Owl masks (back to the Birds of Ireland content). For a resource with quick, easy STEM lesson ideas, follow this link.
Step-by-step guided to create this owl viewer found here.
What I need to do next with regards to the Primary Language Curriculum
In one word- GAEILGE.
I’m still not 100% confident in my Gaeilge teaching as I’ve mentioned before in this post: Insecurities in the Classroom: Supporting Teachers. With that said, a massive point mentioned at the training for the Primary Language Curriculum was to link Gaeilge in to all of this as well.
The idea is that, children have been fully immersed in a particular text type so much in English that they should have a good grasp of it. Thus linking Gaeilge to the same text type and supporting them through banks of phrases, vocabulary and again oral language practice to set them up for success.
Language learning is always successful when it’s contextual and purposeful. This way, children for example will be learning about fairytales in English (Reading, Writing and Oral Language) and should also be learning about Fairytales as Gaeilge. In theory, the children understand the text type through English, so in order to be successful, they need to be equipped with the correct vocabulary and phrases to write a short fairytale as Gaeilge too.
Final thoughts on the Primary Language Curriculum
Wrapping my head around all of this has been the hardest part. But when I broke it down into its basics and saw through its vagueness,I have come to the conclusion that teacher’s lives will be made a lot easier this way. As stated above, the children will be set up for success with their language learning.
I’ve decided to create a Growing Bundle for my resources that I make, which immerse children in a particular text type. These resources will be suitable for 2nd-4th class and easy to adapt to fit the needs of your own class. The aim of this growing bundle is to save you TIME and effort planning quality Writing lessons, you just have to download and teach. Lastly, once you purchase this bundle, you get any new material I add to it for FREE. All you have to do is hit ‘re-download’.
The core objective of the Primary Language Curriculum appears to be immersion of language in an interesting way. A way that is motivating children to WANT to read and write. I will write another post as the year progresses with any new information/insights I’ve developed on this curriculum so keep an eye!
If you have any comments, advice or support you can offer in regards to the Primary Language Curriculum, please leave a comment below.
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