For years we have been handed excuses by schools for failing to teach their children basic literacy: ‘We’ve got lots of boys in the class’. ‘Many of the children have summer birthdays’. ‘A majority of our children are from very poor backgrounds’. ‘Lots of our children don’t speak English as a first language’. Time and… Continue reading ‘The best that we can be’
This post follows on from my last, where I implied that teaching is an extraordinarily specialised job and requires that teachers who teach literacy are very well trained. In this post, I am making the point that, where teachers are well-trained, they produce results that knock your socks off!Way back in December 2010, I published… Continue reading St Thomas Aquinas’s remarkable results
A question I’m often asked in regard to correcting spelling in pupils’ work usually runs along the lines of: My child is in Y3 and the teacher hasn’t corrected such and such a spelling mistake. Is the teacher right and, if not, what should the teacher be correcting? Well, as the writing system in English… Continue reading How to correct common spelling errors
The following lists are provided courtesy of Sarah Donarski’s perspectEd blog. Sarah is an English teacher at Wellington College in Crowhorne in Berkshire. The lists are updated ‘sophisticated spellings’ for GCSE English. Many thanks to Sarah for sharing them! All I have done is to syllabify the words in her lists and, in so doing,… Continue reading Sarah Donarski’s ‘Sophisticated spellings’ syllabified
