Key Stage 2 - Literacy

Years 3 to 6

New Literacy sessions on Creative Writing, taught by a published author, and lively Storytelling, join Authors from the Past to offer yet more choice. All sessions and materials are free.

Storytelling

© National Portrait Gallery, London

New

Storytelling: Portraits come alive

Kick start your literacy work – either speaking and listening or writing – with our new storytelling sessions.  Ideal across KS2 for launching biographies, adventures, stories that raise issues or that have historical settings. Expand your pupils’ imaginations with plenty of chances to contribute their own ideas and create a pictorial storyboard. Your class will discover that truth really can be stranger than fiction.

Choose a theme:

  • Adventure  
  • Discovery  
  • Weird and Wonderful

90 minutes
One class, maximum 30 pupils

Authors from the Past – Older Literature

A dynamic session where pupils can examine portraits, hear book extracts and discuss the writing techniques of famous authors such as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Beatrix Potter and, when available, JK Rowling for a modern comparison. Pupils drawing directly from an author’s portrait, and discuss our response to their work today.

  • This session supports the National Literacy Strategy Framework, Year 5: Narrative, Unit 1: Novels and stories by significant children’s authors, and Unit 4: Older literature
  • 90 minutes
  • One class, maximum 30 pupils
  • Follow-up webquest: KS 2 English Just So Stories (reading and writing animal stories)

New

Creative Writing – Portraits into Words

  • 10.30 to 12.30
  • One class, maximum 30

Bring your class to meet a published author, look at portraits through new eyes and turn looking into creative writing. Description, dialogue, diary entries, persuasive speeches, dramatic writing and journalism – they are all hidden in portraits, waiting to be released into the pupil’s own writer’s notebook and finished later on in school. Choose a date (with alternatives) and a theme.

October 2012
Weds 3 - Themes: Eminent Victorians or Theatre People

November 2012
Thurs 8 / Thurs 29 – Themes: Eminent Victorians or Turbulent Times

January 2013
Thurs 17 – Themes: Eminent Victorians or Artists and Writers

February 2013
Thurs 28 – Themes: Eminent Victorians or Turbulent Times