Review: William’s word games for Food and Digestion by William Hirst

Literacy across the curriculum is a huge focus in schools now and many of us that have been teaching for a while are learning strategies that work as we go along. There are lots of supporting resources that are released but how do we know what is worth buying?

Fortunately a number of authors like William Hirst (author of William’s words which I reviewed here) are producing high quality resources at reasonable prices for the busy department. The latest release from William is a set of resources for the food and digestion topics. I’ve flicked through my review copy and have summarised my thoughts below:

What I like

What could be better

Lots of key words including ones I probably would never of thought of Good for enrichment/extension/embedding purposes Clear instructions are given with each activity – it isn’t just assumed that the teacher will know how to do them Jigsaw puzzles and new activities that students won’t have done before Everything is ready to go right even down to individual word lists for hangman The price is fairly reasonable for a large department – the rrp is £30

As before the font isn’t good for some SEN students but I’m sure an SEN version will be coming along soon The size of the file makes flicking through the many pages difficult on slower devices like older tablets. I would suggest using PDF indexing tools or even page numbers to aid navigation The material can’t be edited so it is very much one size fits all. With words like barium meal in, the material may require you to explain some words you may not have used in your lesson It only covers a relatively small topic in the whole science scheme – although William is gradually releasing more materials and does offer multibuy deals.

I’ve included some screen shots so you can see some different activities like jigsaws, foldable fortune tellers, hangman words and part of the index showing how you can track words to activities. I would recommend this book to the busy science department, it is another useful tool for working on literacy skills.

Update: I used the literacy flowers with my Y8 group and have posted a photo below (one of the students managed to mix his pieces up between assembly and gluing!)

Literacy flowers