As the government acknowledges in its document on spelling, throughout the whole of Key Stage 2, teachers ‘should continue to emphasise to pupils the relationship between sounds and letters, even when the relationships are unusual’.The word lists for Years 3 and 4 and for Years 5 and 6 are statutory and, again, in the government’s words, they… Continue reading Statutory Spelling lists syllabified
St George’s – from crisis to calm is the story of a school that twelve years ago was failing, and failing so badly it was in special measures. What that failure meant was that a good number children moving on to secondary school were unequipped to cope with the demands of the secondary curriculum. A huge… Continue reading St George’s Church of England Primary School: from crisis to calm
The allure of using Whole Language to teach children to read lies mainly in the fact that, as you’d expect, humans are heavily biased towards meaning and a whole word approach has an immediate appeal because, at the beginning, it seems so easy. On the other side of the methodological divide, learning how to recognise… Continue reading What are the problems with Whole Language and why doesn’t it work?
One particular news item reporting on the death of David Bowie harked back to an interview he did with Jeremy Paxman on BBC2’s Newsnight programme, which you can see here. As probably everyone knows by now, Bowie changed his name from David Jones early on his career but what was fascinating about his meeting with… Continue reading Bowie bows out