Here we go again! in the latest issue of Nomanis, Stephen Parker has written an article on how we should be teaching phonics to children entering school. While Stephen offers some very useful advice, there is (at least) one of his recommendations that needs to be studiously ignored: his invocation to teach letter names to… Continue reading Advocating the teaching of letter names to children just entering school is crass

A friend of mine is currently doing an advanced training course on dialogue facilitation. She was telling me about her course and something she said resonated with me about the work we do in training teachers to deliver our phonics approach. The aim of the programme she is learning to facilitate is to explore cross-cultural… Continue reading Phonics and scripts

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the skills, the knowledge, and conceptual understanding young children need to develop to mastery level. What I haven’t mentioned is the sort of really ‘super-charged, value-added component’ that should come with any high-quality phonics teaching. As always on this blog, I’ll talk about the detail of what… Continue reading Super-charged phonics

Why, at Sounds-Write, do we begin our teaching with word-building? There are three main reasons: we are teaching children that spellings stand for sounds in the language; we are teaching them specifically which particular spellings stand for the particular sounds in the words we are going to be using; and, we are teaching the skill… Continue reading Why do we emphasise segmenting skills more than blending in learning to read and write?

    Just over a week ago on the Today programme ( 22/10/18), the BBC ran a piece on an up-and-coming rugby union star (Christian Wade) in England who has decided to pull up stakes and try his hand at American Football. Presumably, because they couldn’t interview the man himself, they spoke instead to someone… Continue reading The Switch