House of Science (Te Whare Pūtaiao) produces bilingual science resource kits for primary and intermediate schools across New Zealand. With a new team of resource designers on board, they wanted everyone writing to one shared standard.
The challenge
Every kit speaks to two audiences at once, students aged 5 to 12 and the teachers delivering the lessons. A new team also brings new writing styles, and House of Science wanted a consistent voice across every manual, handout, card and poster. Our Scored Document Reviews showed where key teaching points could lead more clearly, and the whole team shared one worry. How do you make the science clear without losing accuracy?
How we helped
We delivered one day of plain language training as two hands-on, half-day sessions on Zoom. We built it from our planning conversations, the team's pre-workshop questionnaires and writing samples, and pages from House of Science's own A Load of Rubbish kit. The team practised organising content with PACE (purpose, action, core and extra), writing strong paragraphs, using active voice and choosing everyday words, mostly on their own kit content.
The outcome
The workshop gave the team a shared standard and a common language to write and review against. Paragraph structure, sentence structure, word choice and active voice stood out as the most valuable topics. Our insight report recommended a standard page pattern for teacher manual activities and a short list of plain word swaps for their style guidelines. We'll score a second writing sample from each participant in a few months to measure the change.
"A well-constructed, engaging workshop that encouraged participation and discussion. The content delivered aligned closely with the learning areas that were agreed to in our planning meeting with Jordan."