Carr Hill — A literacy companion built around SPaG targets, academic vocabulary and a repeating reading-review spread

The brief

Carr Hill came to us wanting a single literacy companion that would sit on every student's desk in English and travel with them across the year. The department wanted three things working together in one book: a clear SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) target-setting system that students could return to and tick off as they mastered each rule; a vocabulary backbone built around the school's own academic word list; and a reading log that used the same template for every book, so a student's tenth review looks like their first. It also needed to feel unmistakably like Carr Hill — branded with the school's dove crest and the "Commitment Aspiration Resilience Respect" values on the cover.

What we designed

Working with Carr Hill, we built a literacy companion organised around four repeating components.

A target-tracking opening section, with space for each student to record their current targets alongside "To hit my target I will:" and "achieved" fields — so progress is visible to the student, the teacher and a parent at a glance.
A 21-target SPaG reference covering the high-frequency errors the department wanted to fix: been/being, your/you're, semi-colons, comma splices, paragraphs, question marks, capital letters, there/they're/their, finite verbs, apostrophes, it's/its, commas, were/where/we're, full stops, a lot vs alot, our/are, modal verbs ("could have" not "could of"), and the past and present tenses of the verb "to be" with a specific note on Lancashire dialect. Each target follows the same layout — rule, explanation, examples — so students always know where to look.
A repeating book-review spread used for every book a student reads: title and author, date started and finished, genre, star rating, plot, review, a "Who would you recommend this book to?" prompt, and a vocabulary-learned panel.
A vocabulary and spelling reference at the back: the Carr Hill Academic Word List (around 180 subject-agnostic academic words from abstract and accommodate through to whereas), a 200 most-commonly-misspelled-words page, and a dedicated "My Misspelt Words" log paired with a "My Notes" page so students can capture and revisit their own errors.

The finished book

The journals are printed in the school's blue with the Carr Hill dove crest on the cover and the school's values — Commitment, Aspiration, Resilience, Respect — running underneath the wordmark. One book per student, one consistent reference for SPaG, vocabulary and reading across the year.