Oz Lit Teacher Blog

It’s NAPLAN season, which means it’s the time of year when teachers start reaching for the same old, tired, persuasive writing mentor texts.  

You kn...

The countdown to the start of the school year is ticking…

I don’t know about you, but my work brain is ON (it does not understand the concept of busi...

Are you looking for a class writing project for the last few weeks of school?

Perhaps something a little different from the usual dull Christmas acti...

I recently worked with a school to build their students’ knowledge around the topic of refugees. 

This topic is quite large, so we tried to break it ...

I’m often asked about the best way to structure writing lessons/ units. E.g.:

• Should we base our writing units around genre? OR

• Should we ba...

In a previous blog post, I talked about the benefits of using cold writes to diagnose student needs (in the same way pre-tests are used in the maths c...

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a blog post introducing the concept of 1%ers in the classroom.

1%ers are the name I give to a list of tiny actions yo...

I’ve noticed a worrying phenomenon in classrooms lately: Whiteboards are becoming noticeboards.

You see, the white on these boards is disappearing in...

Earlier this week, the Victorian Education Minister announced a new phonics mandate for Victorian schools.  Although the details are still filtering t...

I always say that if there's one thing we primary school teachers are good at, it’s taking something and implementing it in ways that were never inten...