The electronic Framework supports teachers in compiling medium-term and short-term plans for teaching literacy, enabling them to do the following.

• Identify learning objectives across the 12 strands and group them together into a cohesive unit of teaching. For example, teachers can identify learning objectives from strands 1 and 2 of the speaking and listening strands and add in objectives from strands 5 and 6 to secure integrated planning across speaking and listening, word recognition and spelling.
• Amend and develop their planned literacy units in the light of their own specific contexts and priorities.
• Plan the word-level and sentence-level work they will need to address in discrete teaching and in the context of reading and writing across the curriculum in order to secure end-of-year expectations.

Some examples of the literacy unit plans use the context of different subjects to demonstrate how to strengthen links between literacy and the broad curriculum. It is essential, for children to secure the learning that has taken place in literacy, that they are supported in applying their literacy knowledge and skills into their work across the curriculum.

If teachers wish to construct alternative literacy units to the examples given within the renewed Framework, the following principles may be helpful. Each planned unit should do the following.

• Cover the development of speaking and listening, reading and writing.
  Lead to learning at a challenging pace towards the end-of-year expectations or beyond.
• Have regular teaching at word-level and sentence-level embedded within it, or identified as discrete teaching alongside it, to ensure children achieve these critical learning objectives in a coherent and progressive way.
• Follow and build upon the teaching sequence, from reading into writing and developing comprehension.
• Fully integrate the appropriate use of ICT opportunities to develop key aspects of learning and assessment opportunities. The planning should consider opportunities for literacy learning both within dedicated literacy teaching time and also across the whole curriculum.
• Involve a wide variety of enjoyable and engaging learning opportunities, related to children's experience, building on previous learning and therefore appropriately personalised.
• Identify the particular needs of children working below or significantly below age-related expectations and the needs of gifted and talented children working significantly above those expectations and plan to meet these needs.