Christmas Activities for KS1 Language and Literacy contains fun festive language activities, designed to harness children's enthusiasm at this exciting time of the year and keep them on task. The word, sentence and text activities are linked to the National Literacy Strategy targets, so integrating them into your planning is easy. The activities include practice at using different punctuation, use of dictionaries, spelling, synonyms, idioms and writing in different genres. Now you can exploit the children's natural enthusiasm for the season and inspire them to create especially good work with this bank of fun, stimulating ideas and activities - so you can all enjoy the run-up to Christmas!

 

This book is suitable for Key Stage 1. KS1 covers school years 1 and 2, and ages 5-7 years. A key stage is any of the fixed stages into which the national curriculum is divided, each having its own prescribed course of study. At the end of each stage, pupils are required to complete standard assessment tasks. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

This book was published 2011 by Brilliant Publications .

A member of the Society of Authors, with over 60 titles to her name, Irene Yates has also written for the Times Education Suppliment, Scholastic Teachers' Magazine and BBC Schools' Radio. An expert in literacy and language development, she became a writing member of the first SCAA KS1 Test Development Team, and contributed to the Reading Tests in 1995, 1996 and 1997. She also visits schools reqularly as a Writer and Poet, and runs teacher training days in all aspects of language development, particularly literacy.