I’m writing this post because I’ve just realised that after over four hundred posts, to my horror, I’ve never talked about Diane McGuinness’s ‘Prototype for teaching the alphabet code’ before. If you want to read it for yourself, you can find it in Early Reading Instruction. Fifteen years ago, amongst the most enthusiastic phonics advocates… Continue reading The beautiful simplicity of McGuinness’s prototype

Have you read Natalie Wexler’s excellent article ‘Writing and Cognitive Load Theory’ in the latest issue (No 4) of researchEd? If you haven’t, it’s well worth a careful look. Natalie is the co-author, with Dr Judith Hochman, of The Writing Revolution, of which I am a great fan. In her researchEd piece, Wexler explains that… Continue reading The building blocks of writing