OK, I need your creative and imaginative ideas. Input from anyone welcomed, no matter what your background/experience might be. Teachers, parents, whoever!
I need creative, imaginative, ACTIVE ideas to teach students basic literacy concepts, and give them opportunities to practise these skills: eg 100% correct sentencing, using connectives, using wider vocabulary, openers, paragraphing, etc.
I've worked in the past doing literacy intervention boosters with small groups of yr7 students, who have always been keen to attend, enjoyed the sessions and made good progress.
This year I'm working with small groups of yr8s and yr9s and it's a whole different story.
I'm trying hard to make the material as dynamic and interesting as possible, but to be honest there isn't a huge amount of literacy you can learn using a pair of scissors and a glue stick and without doing any writing! (This would be their definition of fun.)
(For any English teachers, I'm focusing on writing AFs and working with students mainly on L4/5 borderline, to try and boost them to a solid/strong L5 by the end of yr9. I teach each group for 3 hrs each week for a block of 6 weeks, so I've got a good amount of time to really have some impact.)
PS We're also having utter IT nightmares at school, so IT-based strategies are not possible at all atm.