FREE lesson plans .... really?

You may be wondering whether we really provide FREE lesson plans and if we do what’s the catch. I don’t blame you after all who gives stuff away totally FREE these days? So let me tell you the story of why we really do give away FREE resources for teachers.

Literacy Matters was formed in October 2000 by Sue McCaldon and Andrea Bernstein. We had worked in schools and then in a Local Authority supporting schools in implementing the literacy strategy. We had been chosen to work in the original pilot because of our ground breaking work in improving kids’ literacy skills. By 2000 we decided we wanted some autonomy so that we could help support teachers rather than do what was rapidly becoming an ‘inspection’ role. Hence the creation of Literacy Matters.

One of the first things we wanted to do was make the life of a teacher easier. We could see that teachers across the country were all having to spend hours planning from the same set of objectives. What a waste of valuable time! We also knew that teachers were so busy that they didn’t really have time to spend hours searching for the best resources. So our website was developed. We found great books and wrote lesson plans and resources and made them freely available to teachers. Thousands of grateful teachers told us we had succeeded in making their lives easier!                                                          

Inevitably things in education are always changing and last year the renewed literacy framework was introduced. So what did we do? We started to rewrite our plans to make them compatible with the changes. So now there are unit plans with weekly plans that follow the objectives,  teaching sequence and phases suggested in the renewed framework. So are there any catches? Yes, we are still writing some plans but the aim is to have them all available soon.

The teaching sequence in the renewed framework rarely identifies specific resources and leaves you to find them yourself. So we have sought out suitable resources. Some of them are books which you may well already have in school. In the past we had been frustrated by books going out of print. We never knew whether they would be reprinted or disappear for ever. So we started to create our own resources. This has a number of advantages:

• The resource will not go out of print!
  
  
• The resources have been written by literacy specialists to meet specific teaching objectives.
  
  
• They are available as both printable resources and as software.
  
  
• You can instantly download them to your computer.
  

Are these resources free? No, we have to have some way of carrying on our work! But we keep the price very reasonable and even better we have a fantastic store offer that gives you access to ALL of the paid for resources. This does not affect your access to the FREE lesson plans - it’s up to you whether you choose to buy our resources.

Or click on one of the year group links on the left.