Ever wondered why when you’re teaching verb tenses that the simple present isn’t about the present? As readers of this blog will know by now, I’m keen on the idea of threshold concepts. A threshold concept, as defined by Glynis Cousins, is ‘central to the mastery of one’s subject’, especially because it enables teachers to ‘make… Continue reading 3 things you wanted to know about the simple present
You might be wondering why I haven’t posted in the blog for a while… Well, I have been busy writing a free-online course for parents and carers, and I am delighted to let you know that it is now live. In fact, it has been live for two weeks now, and since then, nearly 1300… Continue reading Help your child to read and write
Blending is the ability to push sounds together to make recognisable words and, in young children learning to read and spell from the beginning of their schooling and in children who have fallen behind, performance is often variable. That is to say that what they can do one day, they may not be able to… Continue reading Can’t blend, won’t blend
This post is written for readers who already have some knowledge of how a good quality phonics programme, cumulatively structured, is organised and how it can be exploited to enable pupils, even at the level of Year 1/2, to read and write virtually any word in the English language. My starting point would be to… Continue reading Reading in text
What with one thing and another, there’s a lot of pressure on teachers today. Grammar and word study has suddenly assumed much greater proportions and one aspect of grammar somebody was asking me about the other day was morphology. The conversation went like this: Teacher: I’ve got to teach my class about morphology. Me: Okay.… Continue reading Morphology
I’ve never used my blog to answer a question from a single individual but, as the subject has come up in other contexts, the post is about reading and spelling simple past tense -ed endings in weak verbs. To be honest, I’m always slightly surprised by this question – it does come up occasionally… Continue reading Simple past tense endings for reading or spelling
I wrote the following response, which I’ve edited slightly and supplemented, to Robert Peal’s excellent piece ‘Planning a knowledge-based scheme of work. Part 1: Reading. You can read it here.Let me state categorically that my response isn’t intended to take away anything from Robert’s endeavour. The work he’s doing is really superb and his generosity… Continue reading How to help secondary pupils with reading and writing complex words
The BBC has reported that Zhou Youguang, the man who brought literacy to millions in China after the communist victory in 1949, died on Saturday 14thJanuary, a day after celebrating his 111th birthday. After working as a Wall Street banker, Zhou decided, in 1949, to return to China to help with rebuilding the country. In… Continue reading Zhou Youguang, inventor of Pinyin
I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about Glynis Cousin’s short introduction to ‘threshold concepts’, an idea developed by Erik Meyer and Ray Land and, although I have reservations about some of the things she argues, I find her central theme quite helpful. She describes a threshold concept as one that is ‘central to the mastery of… Continue reading Threshold concepts and the idea of sound to print
Following on from two previous postings (here and here) on the subject of cognitive load in the domain of the teaching of phonics, here is a practical demonstration of the cognitive challenges a four-year-old child has to contend with in just one simple word building exercise. But first, why word building? Word building is our… Continue reading The Reading Achievement Challenge – the child’s view at the point of learning
