Charlotte's Web!

Here is another take on a display dedicated to the book Charlotte's Web. You will notice I like to use the same books in class (as they are classics!) which means I have many different displays on the same theme / book.

This display is a combination of the book and the theme of farming which we studied in geography lessons alongside the book. At my school they are keen on having books on shelves and resources displayed on display tables which match the display (to make displays tactile and interactive) so you will see a row of non-fiction books on the windowsill complementing my display. The children love to look and browse through these books to find out facts about what's being studied.

Take a look at this Charlotte's Web display and let me know your thoughts...

The farming section of the display filled with key vocabulary and facts.

The webs!

A close up of an early stage of making Charlotte's web. Above, on the hanging twigs, we extended the spider's web to include 'baby' spiders which the children enjoyed trying to spot when they first saw the display! Using materials like this cotton wool (I picked it up from the Poundshop I think as a Halloween decoration) makes the display tactile and draws the children into touching it and exploring / reading everything else on display. It also looks good to!

Genre Map ~ Key features of text types

One way to help children understand the key features of a text type is to pick texts apart and find them themselves.

As part of shared reading sessions and literacy lessons, at the beginning of studying a new genre, we read lots of good quality examples of that text type and investigate it asking the question 'What makes this a ...?' We do this for both fiction and non-fiction text types.

Once we find out what those key features are, we display them on a genre map on our literacy display. The types of features we are looking for are: content, language, organisation/ layout and the purpose and audience. Of course as teachers, all these key features are in our planning before hand so we know exactly what we want the children to find. You could make it a challenge whereby all the key features are already on cards and they have to find all the answers on the cards by the end of the lesson/week.

I also like to display highlighted and annotated copies of texts on the display that we've explored so the children/ myself can refer back to them when learning/ teaching. The children like to magpie ideas from these too.

Here is my genre map display in the making...

As you can see the display is flexible and handwritten as the key features can be found and added at any time - another look at a literacy working wall really!