Literacy Bites Strategy @ Plumpton High School

7 Aug 2026

Every week, our staff get a Literacy Bite — and our students get the benefit at Plumpton High School.

Literacy Bites is a short newsletter that lands in every teacher's inbox at Plumpton High School. Each edition unpacks one element of grammar and hands teachers a practical strategy they can use in their very next lesson. Students benefit from easy-to-implement skills which have a big impact on their writing.

So far we've covered topics such as: precise action, saying and sensing verbs; building detailed noun groups with describers, classifiers and qualifiers; nominalisation to improve phrasing of complex concepts; using personal and possessive pronouns to make writing flow; combining clauses into compound and complex sentences; adding circumstances to answer when, where, why and how; and moving beyond bare assertions so students can acknowledge other perspectives in an argument.

Some examples of what that looks like for our students:

• A Science student writes “the colourful Southern corroboree frog with yellow and black stripes that lives in Kosciuszko National Park” instead of “the frog” — classification, description and habitat in a single phrase.

• A History student improves their vocabulary by swapping “said” for “claimed”, “conceded” or “announced”, and suddenly their source analysis has a point of view investigated historical perspectives.

• An English student learns to compact four clumsy clauses into one dense, controlled sentence. For example, "The novel was written by Suzanne Collins and it came out in 2008 and it is a dystopian story and it is really thrilling” turns into “Suzanne Collins' thrilling 2008 dystopian novel”. Students develop concise control of language, allowing them to craft sophisticated responses.

• A Geography student connects their ideas with conjunctive adverbs like “therefore”, “however” and “as a result”, so their extended response builds an argument instead of listing facts.

Writing isn't just an English skill. Our students write in every subject, every day, and when every teacher shares the same language for talking about writing, students hear a consistent message wherever they go. The small changes that students make to their writing add up to real improvements. We're proud that the initiative has been recognised by our Director, Educational Leadership and can’t wait see more progress from all out students.

Big thank you to the incredible Literacy team at Plumpton High School and specifically Ben Porritt who leads the team and this high leverage strategy that is supporting our teachers and in turn students.

Tim Lloyd, Principal

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