ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ideas for approaching the teaching of non-fiction. The ideas were piloted by a group of hard-working teachers in an infant school in Chatham, Medway. It is 'flavoured' with multimodality - an acknowledgement that print-based texts are just one of the many forms of text with which children engage on a daily basis. Different kinds of texts need to be read in different ways and I suggest how the skills of critical literacy can be developed using texts from a range of different modes. Children in their everyday lives have experience of, and familiarity with, non-fiction texts in a wide range of modes. This chapter considers how literacy teaching in primary schools needs to build on this experience and familiarity. The changing nature of literacy cannot be ignored and I will argue that schools which embrace the changes, working with real texts that are integral to children's lives, will be equipping their pupils to be critically literate in the twenty-first century.
