International Literacy Day

The 8th of September was proclaimed International Literacy Day (ILD) by UNESCO in 1966 with the aim of championing literacy as a fundamental human right and to remind us all of its importance for individuals, communities and societies worldwide.

773 million people across the globe still lack basic literacy skills and the sudden transition to remote learning during the pandemic has only worsened the situation. Many learners are unable to access digital resources due to poor connectivity, insufficient infrastructure or a lack of know-how. ILD 2021 aims to highlight this issue with this year’s theme: ‘Literacy for a human-centred recovery: Narrowing the digital divide’.

At 2Simple we want to help by raising awareness of ILD and the importance of young people gaining skills that are needed throughout life in the form of literacy. Here we look at just some of the resources available within Purple Mash that can help young learners engage with literacy and enjoy it for life.

Text Toolkit

Head to the Text Toolkit to create spelling, grammar and word games within Purple Mash. It contains five tools that allow you create activities that teach vital literacy skills in a fun, engaging way. Because you build the activities you are able to tailor them to the needs of your class. Skills covered include sentence structure and composition, verb forms, and word classes. The Text Toolkit is also home to Purple Mash favourite Developing Tray, which draws children of all ages and abilities into drawing assumptions on a piece of text.

Grammar Games and Resources

If you’d rather not build your own games using the Text Toolkit, try our Grammar Games, a series of ready-made literacy activities. To help your children fly we’ve organised them into age groups, from Hatching Out – aimed at 5-6 year olds – through to Soaring Eagles – for ages 10 –11.

There's also a host of Grammar Resources organised by theme, making it easy to find the resources you need. With a mixture of offline and on screen resources, you can teach Grammar skills in a way that best suits your timetable and class.

Spelling Scheme of Work

We’ve developed a Spelling Scheme of Work that covers the entire year and spans every year group from Year 1 all the way to Year 6. The comprehensive scheme includes a 'Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check' document, a Dictation pdf and an online spelling quiz for every single week of the school year, organised neatly into half-terms.

The spelling quizzes are a fantastic way of engaging the children with their spellings both during and out of school hours. You can even make your own spelling quizzes using 2Quiz with the ability to generate score reports for individual, groups or classes.

Serial Mash - Your online library

Learners should to be encouraged to read, both fiction and non-fiction. A great starting point is Serial Mash. As the name suggests, this is a collection of serialised fiction for children from five years old upwards. There’s even a collection of books for reluctant readers.

Serial Mash is all about reading for pleasure, but it’s not just time off for the kids! Each chapter is followed by a variety of activities that not only test children’s knowledge of what they’ve just read but also cover other areas of the curriculum., eg sustainability, history, digital techologies and more. As well as a teachers’ guide, there are also planned timetables and other resources to make your life easier.

You might wish to combine reading with writing reviews. The Book Reviews section is in the section entitled Writing genres and themes. The nice thing about the book review templates is that the idea of the standard book review has been supplemented by several exciting variations. For example, one template invites the children to create a comic strip about part of the book, while another is about sending a postcard from the book.

In addition to the book itself, the children can turn their attention to the author, through an author fact file. Definitely worth a look!

We hope you have fun this International Literacy Day. Please feel free to share any work with us on Twitter @2SimpleAustralia or @PurpleMash, or on Facebook @2SimpleAus.