Written specifically for primary school teachers and student trainee teachers, this book offers inventive ideas for the classroom together with an accessible and informative summary of the theories that underpin them.

1. The big ideas 2. Principles and practices 3. Foundation Stage: 'Tell me a story' 4. Foundation Stage: Playing with role: 'Little Boy Blue' 5. Foundation Stage/Y1: Time for rhyme 6. Outside in, inside out, or reading and writing out and about: environmental print 7. Dance your way to a story 8. Reporting back: reading non-¿ction and writing non-chronological reports 9. Shapely poems and calligrams: starting not from text, but from language and visual images 10. Dear Giant - Dear Jack: creating a sequence of letters 11. Cyclones! Information books on same or similar themes: literacy across the curriculum 12. Where did our writing come from? Exploring the writing process 13. Writing is not speech written down: spoken language and written language: a language-based unit 14. Whatever happened to Lucy Gray? Classic poetry 15. 'We made the story!' Making whole stories with underachieving, uninterested boys 16. Enjoying a good argument? Writing discursively