Making Good Use of the Plenary Session

Making Good Use of the Plenary Session

The Literacy Hour plenary sessions open up opportunities for children to practise and develop their skills in assessment, speaking, listening, presentation and the use of ICT. They provide a valuable focus on task completion, and allow for ongoing assessment by the teacher. They can even be fun; yet with all this, we often forget or under-use them. The following are some suggestions for different styles of plenary and some activities you might want to use. Hopefully these will inspire lots more of your own.

General Principles

In general, the most can be made of the plenary session if it is regarded as a child-led part of the literacy hour rather than as teacher led, though it should certainly be planned as continuous with the whole-class and group learning objectives. If one group presents their work each day, it can help to focus the work in independent tasks, and may thus be a useful tool in classroom management. By Year 6, we would hope that children would be able to read their task from a task card, collect the materials, follow the instructions, time themselves, and have their co-operative presentation ready for the plenary session, which requires further individual and co-operative work, and attention to the audience. Many children in earlier years may also be able to manage this. From KS1, we are working to develop children’s independent learning skills and moving them towards such a self-reliant model.

If children present the session, the teacher is able to assess them in a range of ways:

·  have they fully understood the task? If not, do they need clearer written instructions, more careful attention to their reading (useful to know prior to SAT’s in both key stages how effectively children are interpreting instructions and information) or more peer discussion of their task?

·  how well have they co-operated in planning their presentation? Has the work been shared out appropriately?

·  how well are they co-operating in delivering the presentation? Does everyone have an opportunity to speak?

·  how are the audience managing? It is much more difficult for children to listen to other children than it is for them to listen to adults. They need to be taught to listen to each other attentively. You may want to help them to develop this skill in KS1by planning plenaries in which they have to guess the riddle, the object of the definition, or the person about whom the rhyme is written. Later in KS2, you may want children to assess a presentation against the written criteria you established in discussion of a text-type in whole class work (helps if you or your classroom assistant scribed on flip-chart or whiteboard while those were being established). Presentations on OHT allow for class reading, use ICT and are fun; but having children read their own work aloud makes it difficult for the audience to concentrate.

·  Your assessment may also include questioning to help children to reflect on their processes. How did you do that? What did you use? Did you consider any other materials/approaches/reference books? Would you do it that way again? are all useful pointers towards a varied and independent learning style.

Presenting written work.

If children have been developing a piece of written text and you want them to present it at plenary, look for a method which does not involve children in reading their own work aloud. Children’s listening skills need to be highly developed if they are to listen attentively to other children reading their work, so it is easy to lose the audience. We may need to support their listening by having the writing presented with a listening purpose. Green group have been writing descriptions of animals. Listen carefully to each of these and see if you can guess the animal. Or; this is a definition of --; does it tell us everything we need to know? If you think anything needs to be added, write a note on your whiteboard. Further, reading out a complete piece of writing somewhat defeats the purpose of writing, which is an activity we do in order that others can have access to our ideas even if we are not present.

Young children and the less able may find it difficult to read their own writing and may invent what they wanted to say, using the words in their presentation that they would have liked to have written. If that is going to happen, let’s make use of it! We need to help children to understand the different purposes of writing. We can ask even young children to make notes to remind them in their presentation; we are thus supporting the development of their presentation skills at the same time as helping them to understand the different types of writing we use, and what we use them for.

Activities

1.  Readers’ Theatre

Readers’ Theatre is a technique developed in New York, which adapts extremely well to the development of children’s reading work in the literacy hour. It can be used in support of objectives such as reading with appropriate expression and developing an understanding of a character’s point of view. It focuses on presentation, thereby meeting a number of speaking and listening objectives. It also helps children to ask relevant questions about the meaning of text and is particularly useful in assisting less able children to read for meaning. It is fun.

You would need to teach the technique in a guided session, but once children have been introduced to it they should work on it together in the independent time in the literacy hour. The group each has a copy of the text of a poem. Ideally, the poem will have been chosen by the group in a previous independent reading session, or it may be provided by the teacher. They will also need pens for text marking. Everyone reads through the poem before beginning to discuss together how best to divide it up for a dramatic presentation. Will they have a narrator, and several voices, or will they divide it in ways which emphasise particular aspects of the poem? There is a lot of reading and re-reading at this stage, and a good deal of discussion about meaning and emphasis. Once they have practised their interpretation, they are ready to present it to the class at plenary, each reading from their marked script to make the presentation as much fun as possible for the audience.

Choose a short poem, at least to begin with; discussion and text-marking take a long time. Then sit back and enjoy the children’s creativity!

2.  Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time, a guided writing session for Year One, develops into a plenary in which children’s writing is presented on an overhead transparency.

This activity relates to a particular book by John Prater, but can be developed with many others when children are learning to follow the fortunes of an individual character through a narrative.

Some of the children in the class for which I developed this were at an early stage of writing. As a shared text, we had been using John Prater’s wonderful book Once Upon A Time, and working on developing character perspective. We had been following the adventures of Mr. Wolf. In this book, Mr. Wolf moves from one traditional tale to another, blowing down the Little Pigs’ houses of straw and stick before spotting Red Riding Hood while on his way to the brick house. She, being a person of personality, stamps on his toe; when he returns to the brick house a giant steps on his tail. We developed a piece of shared writing (whole class) called Mr. Wolf’s Bad Day, starting with decision to write a narrative text telling his story. This allowed for discussion of the fact that the text-type the book uses is not narrative; it is in rhyme (couplets) and there is no story in the book which begins ‘once upon a time…’. We composed the first paragraph together, and I scribed it, demonstrating the application of phonics, sentence construction and punctuation. In independent time, a ‘more able’ group wrote the next paragraph, and the most able children the third, making notes first for the three items to be included. Two groups used a sequencing frame with the first and last of six spaces filled in; ‘first Mr. Wolf waited in the trees’ and ‘So he went home howling!’ Their task was to decide which were the most important events to put in the other four spaces.

The guided group were children who were just starting to write. I had photocopied the pictures from the small copy of the book, deleting the text, and I gave the children one picture each at random. They were to write one thing about the picture underneath it, put it back, and take another. If something was already written there, they were to read it and add to it.

After ten minutes, we looked at the pictures. Some had one piece of text written on them, some had two; one had three. We put them in order, and then I passed the pile round. Each child was to read out one piece of the text aloud (not usually their own writing) so that I could write from their dictation onto an acetate sheet.

As they tried to read each other’s writing, asking for help from the writer when necessary, they began to see why it mattered to get the spelling readable!

The acetate sheet on the OHP formed the plenary, with children from the rest of the class reading aloud the words the guided group had written. Although it is usually an independent group who prepare the plenary, this was a new technique, and my guided group were very excited to explain how we had worked. Their writing was a communication to the rest of the children, so the activities of writing and reading were developed together.

3.  Word Collection

Word Collection is a very simple activity which is particularly useful where children are working on complex phonemes such as long vowel phonemes. Using the outcome of the children’s independent work at plenary time brings the discussion into the whole class arena. In the independent time, children work in pairs from a task card which asks them to collect and classify examples of a grapheme. They can use any written text, though dictionaries are not very useful. For example:

Objective: to recognise the sounds represented by - oo.

In pairs, collect and classify examples of words with the - oo spelling.

- oo as in moon - oo as in cook - oo as in blood

While this looks simple, children need to read the whole sentence and make sure that they have read the word correctly in context before they can allocate it to a column. Working in pairs generates discussion. Most children could do this work in their spelling journals, but for the presentation group you could add another sentence to the task card:

Presentation Group.

Copy your lists on to an acetate. Be ready to explain how you decided where to put each word you found.

Children could, of course, use a flipchart or large paper, but it is less easily correctable and the OHP is more fun and more motivating. It also has a ‘magic lantern’ effect which helps to hold the audience’s attention, and can be written on – and deleted from - during the discussion about the choices. Assessment will tell you a good deal about which children are fully confident in applying their phonic skills to their reading.

Hot Seating

Hot Seating is an excellent way to develop understanding of character perspective and account for motivation. Being oral, it allows children to explore the range of vocabulary available to a character, consider the sentence constructions appropriate to the character, and to infer meaning through listening (a character may wilfully mislead the questioner!) It is very simple to set up.

A character from a text on which the children are working is chosen, and a child from the class represents that character, answering questions posed to her, or to him, by the audience. With older children, you may want the audience to work in pairs with whiteboards to generate their questions, making sure that they are properly constructed. The teacher, or a support teacher or classroom assistant may demonstrate the technique but children will very quickly want to take over! Hot seating is a very useful way to deepen children’s appreciation of the dynamics of a text, and to understand causality; characters act in a particular way because… Once the understanding of causality begins to show up in children’s own writing of fictional text, the writing begins to develop intensity and sophistication. From Red Riding Hood’s Wolf to Michelle Magorian’s Mr. Tom, every character in a fictional text acts for reasons which are hidden in the text, and can be revealed through hot seating. Once the children have mastered the technique, they may be ready to cope with a panel discussion with more than one character putting across a point of view, which helps to develop thinking about tension in a text. Assessment of hot seating gives you a good deal of information about children’s thinking skills.

Have fun with your plenaries – and let your imagination run away with you!

Jenny Plastow

April 2001

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