Having been round the literacy block a few times, I did permit myself a smile when I read the title of the paper by Anne Castles et al ‘Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert.’ Good luck with that, I thought. And, sure enough, who should pop up with an anti-phonics/anti-Phonics Screening… Continue reading Exploding myths – imploding arguments
A couple of weeks ago, Debbie’s son Kofi wrote his name. Kofi and his mother Debbie had been making a shopping list when Kofi asked for a piece of paper and wrote his name. He wrote, completely unaided, without his mother having to hold his hand or to prompt him, and, said each sound as he… Continue reading Kofi and the art of the possible
This is the fourth and final blog post about my talk at ResearchEd Auckland. The earlier ones are here, here and here. Learning, as we always tell teachers on our phonics training courses, is uneven and is punctuated by sudden improvements, long plateaus, and/or periods of regression. That’s what learning looks like. It’s messy! To… Continue reading The role of the teacher
This post is the third of four, where I share with you the presentation I gave at the recent ResearchEd conference in Auckland, New Zealand. When teaching children to read and write in English, as teachers, our problem lies in devising efficient instructional procedures for teaching the complexities of the English alphabet code, and… Continue reading Reading: from working memory into long-term memory
