Maximizing a 60-Minute Literacy Block: Strategies for Teachers

Have you ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day, especially when it comes to teaching literacy? You're not alone. In our latest episode, we dive straight into the heart of this dilemma, revealing how to maintain a high-quality English program within the tight squeeze of a 60-minute frame. We're handing over the blueprint for educators to seamlessly weave together the essential threads of literacy instruction, even when they're teaching English to students in French immersion contexts or juggling packed schedules.

Key Topics Covered:

- The Challenge: We kick off by acknowledging the difficulty of fitting a comprehensive literacy curriculum into a shortened timeframe and the factors that often lead to this situation.

  - Leveraging Overlapping Skills: Discover how to identify and utilize the skills that overlap between English and French (for French Immersion teachers), allowing for a more streamlined approach to teaching literacy.

- Advocating for a Supportive Schedule: Learn how to communicate effectively with your administration to negotiate a more literacy-friendly timetable.

- Maximizing Instructional Time: Strategies for structuring your 60-minute block to include warm-ups, teacher-directed lessons, centers, and lessons focused on writing, grammar, and morphology.

- Prioritizing Instructional Time:Tips for evaluating and minimizing non-instructional activities that cut into teaching time.

- Using Resources Wisely:  An introduction to adapting resources, like Ignited Literacy, to fit a 60-minute literacy block by adjusting activities and timelines.

Additional Resources:

- Ignited Literacy: Customize this resource to fit your 60min Literacy Block

Connect with Us:

- Leave your questions and comments below; we love hearing from you!

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- Share this video with fellow educators who might benefit from these strategies.

Closing Thoughts:

Teaching literacy within a 60-minute block presents unique challenges, but with the right strategies and a bit of creativity, it's possible to provide a rich and effective learning experience for your students. Remember, the goal isn't just to cover material, but to inspire and engage your students in the wonders of language every single day.

Check out Ignited Math and Ignited Literacy and learn how you can get your math and literacy lessons planned for the whole year to save yourself hours and hours of doing it all yourself at www.ignitedteaching.ca

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

All right.

Speaker 1: 0:15

So there are teachers out there that are not given 100 minutes for their literacy block and in fact, they're given 60 minutes, yet still expected to cover the exact same amount of content that those of us that get 100 minutes are. So this video is all about what to do for only given 60 minutes of language instruction and how to structure that time so that you can fit it all in. So the first is we need to acknowledge that there is a challenge here in needing to fit 100 minutes worth of language into 60 minutes, and that we're still required to cover the essentials of our literacy block, yet we're given significantly less time than other teachers to do so. Now there's a few reasons why this happens and a few things that we can do to continue to provide a high quality language program without trying to do 100 minutes worth of stuff and 60 minutes worth of time. So here's there's lots of reasons why a teacher might have only 60 minutes of literacy instruction. For some, it's in the context in which they're teaching, so they have a schedule that might predict that they might have less. There might be more things that they have to fit in, perhaps if you're teaching in a religious school, such as a Catholic, publicly funded school, then you were required to not only do language but also fit in religion in English. You also are talking about those teachers that are teaching English to French immersion students. So you are given less time in order to teach English because the French immersion students are getting most of their language instruction through French language.

Speaker 1: 1:58

And there's also just timetabling problems. Perhaps this year you're given just not a great timetable and you need to figure out how you are going to timetable your subject so that you can actually get an Eek in enough time for language. And then there's the pressure, the external pressure that you might have, or somebody like it's fine, don't worry about it, you could totally integrate your science and your religion and your social studies all into your language blocks, which essentially just means you have less time to do things in a day. You also may have things like prep coverage, teachers that are coming in to take your class but yet not covering a reportable subject during that time, which then in turn just reduces the amount of time you have to cover the same amount of content. There's lots of various reasons why only having 60 minutes per day might be the situation that you are in. There's a few things that we can do to mitigate some of these problems find some extra time and structure our literacy blocks so that we can still provide high quality teaching within that 60 minutes.

Speaker 1: 3:06

The first situation that I find that is most common is teaching English to French immersion students. Now, typically in this situation, your French immersion students will be receiving more language instruction in French language and covering the French language document and not covering the language document, and then you, as the English only teacher and teaching core English to these students, are provided the mandate that you were to cover the language document in significantly less time than your English only counterparts would be provided to cover the same amount. Now, one of the things that you need to remember is, when you're teaching English students that are in the French immersion program, you're teaching them English is that while you, they are receiving instruction in two language. There are many skills that overlap and are the same, so you have to be really strategic in how you approach what you spend time on and what you emphasize in your language program. One of the keys here is to look for some shared learning goals between both this French curriculum document as well as the language curriculum document, looking for areas where there is overlap, where you know that your French language colleague will be teaching that same skill and far more depth in the French language than you will need to cover in English. So while I, as a teacher with a hundred minutes of language, may have opportunities to dig in a little bit deeper in certain skills and strategies, it may not be necessary for you to go quite as deep on those as I would, because your students are receiving that instruction. They're just receiving it in French. Things like comprehension strategies, writing forms, are gonna be pretty universal regardless of what language they're being provided instruction, and that learning is transferable. So you won't need to go into the same depth as you would if you were only teaching the language and you didn't have that partnership with their whole room FI teacher.

Speaker 1: 5:02

So it's really important to look at the two documents with both you and the French language teacher and look at where skills are overlapping, where there might be things that would be common, that it doesn't matter. You're teaching conceptually what is happening and it's gonna be the same in English or in French. Now there will be skills that won't be the same, that will be uniquely French or uniquely English, and that's where you should concentrate your time in. What you spend the most amount of time doing Doesn't mean that you don't cover it. It's just the depth and complexity in which you will need to spend your time on those concepts may not be as much as your English only counterparts, because you know they're also receiving that instruction in their French language program, something that would not necessarily happen with those that are receiving core French in a regular English program. They're not. Their focus in core French is gonna be a lot different, whereas in French immersion you are teaching them language just in French, so they're teaching them how to write, so they're gonna teach them writing forms, they're teaching them reading and comprehension strategies and all of those skills. So that is going to be something that you might need to touch on, but not go into the same depth and complexity as, say, your English only teachers. So really, we're gonna look at those overlapping areas inside both of those documents and I find it's really important to collaborate with the French language teacher to come to an agreement where they are gonna go into depth on these areas and you might not need to Some of the areas that you may wanna consider reducing the complexity in which you instruct at in English.

Speaker 1: 6:41

Core English is gonna be on re-incomprehension strategies. While you're still gonna touch on them and model them, you may not need to go into them as in depth as you did with English only students, because they're going to be getting them in two languages. So they're really going to consolidate both of that learning and see the connection between the French and English and see that they're similar. Forms of writing. Understanding a plot structure, understanding how to structure a report into paragraphs and subheadings, text features all of those are going to be really similar. Whether you're teaching them the language of it in French or the language of it in English, we're going to understand text structure. So, while you may review it and go over it, you may not need to spend weeks and weeks going over those skills because they're already spending the weeks and weeks in their home room core French or home room French immersion.

Speaker 1: 7:30

Classroom Media literacy is another area where you may not need to focus a tremendous amount of time. There may be elements that they are already doing in media. You may want to simply pass on that subject to the Fi teacher because they may be covering it already. So therefore, if there's something they can do the reporting on because they have more time. You can negotiate that with your co teacher to make sure that, yes, they're covering it and they can cover those expectations. They just happen to be doing those same skills but in French. Or you can co teach it so that they're teaching the same thing in French that you're teaching in English and you just reduce the complexity of the assignment that you are engaged in, reduce the frequency of how many lessons you're doing on that topic so that you're still covering it, but not to the same depth and complexity.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Curse of writing is another one. Whether you're cursive writing in French or you're cursive writing in English, you are still forming the letters in the same way. So that comes down to negotiating with the other teacher what, who is going to cover this and what they're going to do in a 60 minute language block. The amount of time maybe you want to do cursive writing is a warm up. Maybe you have a cursive writing book that you share that has both English and French words in it so that students can see the connection. That's a great opportunity for you to collaborate and have the same, say warm up or early finishers cursive writing practice book that students can use in both classrooms so that they can see the connection between both of those languages.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Now, there are going to be some differences and this is where the focus should be for those teaching core English. This is what you really want to be spending your time on and focusing on, so that you can make sure that students are getting the solid lessons in English. That is not going to be the same as in French. You know they may be getting similar lessons, but the mechanics of what they're learning is going to be different. So you're really looking at those core language skills, focusing on conventions and when we use columns and punctuation it's always great to be using in English. We're going to be looking at specifically decoding and fluency making sure that students can read and decode those large words, especially in the middle grades, from grades four, five and six and beyond. We really want to get them to understand how to break apart larger words into syllables, prefixes and suffixes, and allowing students to understand how to decode these larger words so that they can read them. Spelling, grammar and the mechanics of all of that is going to be important as well, because it is going to be different in French. We still have to be able to read in English. We want to be able to write in English. We want to get the lots of time for practice and writing and in reading in the English language. That will also supplement some of the skills and strategies that they're doing in French as well.

Speaker 1: 11:53

No, another problem that might lead to you only having 60 minutes is, frankly, your timetable just might suck Now. This is a great thing to advocate at the beginning of the year or in fact now, as your principles are starting to look at what it's going to be next year, how they're going to staff things, what they're going to put when. Now is a good time to plan, to bugging your principal's ear about what was not working about your schedule this year, what you'd like to see change. Do this in a way that's super collaborative and helpful to the principal to give them that feedback of. You know it was really hard for me to eke out enough time for language. Is there any way we could have maybe a larger block, a couple of days a week, where it's not interrupted by say this or this? Sometimes you're interrupted by prep coverage schedules and there's always those conversations that you have perhaps with the union rep or perhaps there's committee that goes into timetabling. Having those conversations that are open and honest and really supportive with your principal are very helpful and making sure that when you do get your timetable that it is actually conducive to teaching with the right amount of minutes.

Speaker 1: 13:03

You can also look at adapting your timetable to make sure that it is working for language. So I always like to, when I first get my timetable, look at where I have large locks and chunks of time and that's always where math will go is if I have a 60 minute of uninterrupted time, I want to do math. Now, language block whether you're given 60 minutes or there's other time that can happen. I'm okay with splitting my language block in half so that I do some of it one period and some of it Another period, and maybe it's broken apart by a reset, is broken apart by a prep coverage. It's okay for me to split my language. Is it ideal? No, but if it means I can pull time from other things, that I will.

Speaker 1: 13:48

The other traps that we often get involved in are doing non curricular focused things during class time and while doing things like morning meetings, and class meetings are super important for building community in our classroom. We really need to look at how much time these are taking out of our instructional time, what is we're doing and how much construction instructional time we're taking, and whether or not we can use that to have some assessment. So if you're taking class meetings, can you incorporate writing into that, say a power writing, where you're getting students to write a reflection on something you've talked about, because there's some way that you can use those class meetings for curriculum, so it is reportable, or language or something? Can you reframe when you do that so that there's a hard stop, so that you don't go over? It is so easy to run a class meeting and have it be completely sidetracked and the next thing you know it's taken 40 minutes when it should have taken 10. So see if there's a time in your day where you could put a class meeting where there is a hard stop so that you don't go over that time and allow you to make sure that your time on task is really important and that you are accountable to that and you have enough time for your language instruction, for your math instruction, for your science and social studies. So we want to ensure that every minute of our day is instructional.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Now this also comes down to the communication and organization of when you were provided prep coverage, to really advocate for yourselves and for your colleagues that all minutes of time your students have are instructional minutes that are reportable subjects. So if you have a teacher taking your class two or three times a week into the library and they're simply not doing something that they're not responsible for reporting, really what's happening there is they are now reducing the amount of time you have to cover the same amount of expectations, whether they're pulling in media, whether they're pulling in health, whether they're doing some language instruction. Make sure that you advocate for yourself that any prep coverage teacher that's coming to cover your class has a reportable subject that they are responsible for. That takes that load off of you. They could do religion, they could do drone law, they could do health. There's lots of things that they can do within their timeframe that allows them to use that as reportable time so that you are given enough time in your schedule.

Speaker 1: 16:17

The other thing I would be severely pushing back on is any time you have an administrator or other colleagues tell you that you should be downloading other subjects into your language block. I am a strong proponent that when you have language. You need to protect that time, and language pushes out into other subjects, but other subjects don't push in. There is plenty of time in a regular 1500 minute schedule. You have 1500 minutes a week of instructional time here in Ontario and that is our mandated instructional time. There's enough time to fit everything in. We just need to make sure that our timetables that are given to us are conducive to allow us to do that. But we should have one to two minutes of teaching or one to two periods a week of teaching science and social studies. I believe that if you are only teaching one then the other, not both of them at the same time, this will allow you to carve out more time for language.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Religion can find its time to be in health. You can time find other times for it to be integrated with things like drama, with health, with arts, not necessarily always with language. I understand that there's an element where you will be pulling in your religion into health, because it does reduce that a little bit. But I think there's other subjects that you can also use cross-curricular approach to make sure that you're covering those subjects as well. So where are you gonna find this time? Well, I think it's important that we really pull down our daily schedule and look at what's happening. So the next question is where are you gonna find the time? Well, this comes down to really strategically looking at your time schedule.

Speaker 1: 17:59

Like I said, I think it's really important that we look and find the large blocks of time within our schedule and look at where we can find time for math. I think math is the one that we really wanna carve out first. Then we're gonna look for some time between 80 and 100 minutes, but we can do language, whether we're doing split shifts where we got two 40 minute periods, whether we maybe do three periods one day and two periods another, or one period another. We really wanna get out enough that we're doing about 500 minutes between 400 and 500 minutes of language instruction each and every week. So really planning those down first.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Then it's a matter of looking at where you're gonna fit your art, where you're gonna fit drama, where you're gonna fit music and you have to teach it. Otherwise, that should be a prep coverage. Most of us have music as prep coverage. When French is gonna happen in our classroom, if we're teaching English students and we've got French coverage, when are we gonna have that happening. That's gonna be a hard coded one when Fizzad and DPA happen in our classroom and then when are science and social studies.

Speaker 1: 19:03

So I like to have two to three periods of science and social studies. That's a shared period. I either do all science, then I switch to social studies, then I switch back to science each term. So I do one social studies and two sciences, a term which allows me to cover everything, and then I can. So I'm not trying to find multiple periods where I'm covering both that are really prep heavy subjects. So first is math, then I'm finding 80 to 100 minutes of language and then I'm fitting everything else in. I really protect my math and literacy first, then it's science and social studies, then it's the other subjects that I have to fit in around those periods.

Speaker 1: 19:45

I also think that it's really important to look at whether or not you're flexing your schedule. It's okay it's not an ideal, but it's okay to split your schedule. If you really are stuck and you cannot get past the 60 minutes every day for literacy and there really is nothing you can do, we're gonna talk about how you can make that work. But sometimes you can fix the 60 minute problem with better timetabling. So we really wanna look at how that efficient timetable is there. So we're going to make sure that we're rotating through subjects, that we've got the prioritization of math and language first, balancing out our science and social studies and then minimizing anything in our schedule that is non-essential subjects. So if we're gonna do morning meetings, how do we make that reportable? If we're going to do them, when are we gonna do them where we're not going to use them instead of doing our language?

Speaker 1: 20:39

In many timetables that I see of teachers there's lots of non-instructional time that is eating away at your schedule. That is meaning that you can't cover the same amount in the same amount of time. One of the largest things is too much integration. We often will get questions about the learning, about whether or not our language program has social studies built into it, and our argument is always the language should push out and not push in. We wanna be integrating language arts throughout other subjects, not bringing those other subjects into language arts and therefore reducing the amount of time we actually have to sufficiently cover language. We wanna make sure that language is cross-subject, that we are supporting the things that we're doing in other subjects, but we need to have more than 500 minutes of time to do that, not less, and it also, when we bring too much into our language program, it dilutes our language periods. There's so much that we need to get covered in language. It's more important that we are using our time otherwise, to do some cross-curricular and cross over in terms of our subjects, instead of always crossing into language.

Speaker 1: 21:56

So how can you organize and structure your 60-minute language block? Well, I'm a big proponent of consistency and scheduling. That means that, as much as you possibly can, let's try to keep your language block, however long it happens, to be as consistent and predictable as possible. This predictability and structure and routine is going to be really beneficial for you and your students because it's going to allow you to fit things in more efficiently, because you get yourself into a routine and you're not starting and stopping every day, not sure where you're going. So really find that routine. It's going to be, ideally, really helpful for you and it also means that you can be adaptable to changing up your learning blocks in your classroom.

Speaker 1: 22:40

So what are some activities that you can do inside your language block? You can teach students spelling rules, morphology and grammar. It's important to teach students how to draft various things of writing in English, as well as editing and revising, to use some application of those mechanic skills that you're teaching them. You want to teach them how to publish their work, teach them writing forms and styles. However, if they are using, if they're in a French wordship program, you may not need to focus on this as much because they may also be focusing on French language. You want to make sure that you're doing guided reading. Whether you want to call it guided reading, it's really small group instruction, so you do want to do that because it gives you lots of extra opportunities for small group assessment. You want to be doing regular read alouds in your classroom, focusing on some reading comprehension, making sure they understand in English and have a good understanding of the things that they read, doing shared reading, as well as building up some oral language skills in English.

Speaker 1: 23:37

Here's a sample schedule for literacy that follows this routine that we follow every week in our classroom. It allows us to have literacy centers, spelling and grammar, shared reading and writing lessons. It starts out with a 15 minute on average rotation between four different activities. Each and every day they come into your classroom to have a 15 minute warm up or centers activity. They do centers activity one. Then they do a teacher directed lesson for 15 to 20 minutes. They're really going to be looking at doing spelling activities, read alouds and a comprehension activities. Throughout the week it's the same time block. That's a teacher directed lesson. The focus may be different each and every week or each and every day, but each week it generally follows that same structure. Then you'll do a time to 15 minute second center and then move into a writing, grammar and morphology lesson structure that is consistent week to week.

Speaker 1: 24:35

One of the ways that you can do this is by using ignited literacy. It follows this routine schedule. Now, as a teacher who's only got 16 minutes, ignited literacy is built on the 100 minute model. However, using these shortened time frames, reducing the complexity of some of the things that you're covering, will allow you to still adapt ignited literacy for a 60 minute model using tailored activities that reduce the time constraints, extending timelines for when things are due. So instead of having students write two pieces of writing per month, you can have them focusing on one good quality piece of writing month because they're given less time in their centers to complete.

Speaker 1: 25:10

You could reduce the amount of centers activities or just lengthen the amount of time students have to complete the same tasks. It also allows you some flexibility in your weekly planning, as you could do one week of ignited literacy. You could span two weeks of your time and covering one week worth of lesson, versus what a hundred minute teacher would do is they would cover one lesson, one week's lesson and one week time. You can cover one week lessons in two week times. It gives you a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 25:39

Extending your timelines allows you the adaptability and flexibility to fit your time schedule depending on what that might look like.

Speaker 1: 25:48

So you can customize your week to fit it into what you need to do making sure that you keep your students completely engaged, making sure with a 90 literacy you would have consistent spelling, grammar, comprehension and writing activities each and every week and you would just be simply adjusting the time that students would take to complete that work and adjusting the amount of time you would have to teach them those teacher directed lessons.

Speaker 1: 26:13

So if you have a 60 minute language block, there's a lot of things that you can do to help you accomplish the objectives of getting through that language curriculum.

Speaker 1: 26:22

You can leverage the overlaps that happen between French and English if you're teaching core English to French immersion students. You can use strategic timetable to maximize the amount that students have with their language instruction, reprioritizing reportable subjects and instructional time to make sure you are timetabling and using your time as effectively as possible throughout the week, maintaining dedicated language learning periods that follow a similar structure and routine each and every week, so it just feels like you're doing a lot of the same things and it makes it a little bit easier and more efficient to plan when you have a routine and a structure that you're following and making sure that you have an adaptable schedule that allows students the flexibility to take slightly longer to do the same tasks and giving yourself permission that you don't have to do it all in the same in less time, but you can just take more time to do the same things. Hopefully that helps keep you an idea of how you can structure a language in your classroom when you only have 60 minutes of literacy learning.