On our Sounds-Write courses, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of practitioners working in schools teaching phonics seem to believe that the three hundred high-frequency words included in the Letters and Sounds manual should be taught as ‘sight words’. What is the answer to this? First, we think it’s a bad idea to teach ‘sight… Continue reading High frequency words
It’s perhaps a little early in the day to be saying this but the signs are that the government has made a huge blunder in putting together resources and training for match funding. Already, it is becoming obvious to us that many schools are using the opportunity to replenish their libraries (a massive allocation of… Continue reading Teach the teachers first!
Why are Letters and Sounds manuals already gathering dust on the shelves of the staff and resources rooms in so many schools? Admittedly L&S is an improvement on some of the rubbish the government has allowed to go out in its name previously – remember the ALS? – but it’s still a very long way… Continue reading Why Letters and Sounds doesn’t work
I wrote about cause and effect on a previous post. Here are some further thoughts. Every teaching approach to literacy used in schools that doesn’t work still probably ends up with about the same 50% of the pupil population being able to read. The practitioners who are trying to teach by these approaches can ALL… Continue reading More thoughts on cause and effect
In the preceding blog postings, I have tried to focus attention on what are fairly straightforward ideas:1) First, human beings invented speech and language.2) Later on, for a variety of practical reasons, writing was invented as a means of consistently and accurately recording speech/language.3) Various approaches to developing accurate writing systems were tried but the… Continue reading What is to be done?