Literacy in Science Training Materials

These Key Stage Three National Strategy training materials from the Department for Education are designed to run a session with science teachers to help them develop literacy in science - through a focus on scientific words, reading, writing and talk.

Components
The sessions can be run as one day or broken into separate sessions, and are structured as follows:

*Session 1 - Introduction and words in science:
Introduces literacy at word, sentence and text level – especially issues around scientific terminology: why some words are difficult, why spelling words accurately may be helpful to the understanding of science and how we can develop students’ skills. Also introduced is a taxonomy of words in science that helps teachers to decide which words are ‘key’.

*Session 2 - Reading in science:
Makes clear the importance of text as a tool for learning science and explores ways in which students can be helped to access science texts. It explores types of reading, shared reading and the use of active reading strategies. It also provides pointers to help teachers to assess useful text sources or to create their own.

*Session 3 - Writing in science:
Explores some text types important to science and provides examples of how students’ writing can be improved. A video sequence shows how writing conclusions can be modelled.

*Session 4 - Talk in science:
Explores why talk is important in science and how best student discussion can be organised, both for the whole class and for small groups.

These materials consist of:
*Tutors notes – includes Overview of the unit, Unit objectives, Outline programme, Synopsis, Preparing for the unit, Resources needed for each session and Evaluation forms.
*Additional handouts – for use in supporting tutors, but this also includes some resources that are suitable for use in class, with many examples of science texts and students’ written work. Reference to these handouts is made in the tutors' notes, pages 9 and 10.
*Training slides for the session
*Participants resource pack – copies of the slides and handouts used in the training
*Summary of key messages