An article titled ‘Sounds like this phonics scheme has started badly’ in the TES today by Helen Ward provides some decidedly revealing insights into what is going wrong in getting schools to take up match funding for phonics.As the piece points out, match funding isn’t ‘free’ money. For every pound provided by the government, the… Continue reading More on the take-up of match funding
You’ve got to give credit to Graeme Paton. He is nothing if not dogged. When it comes to trying to get something done about the numbers of children being unable to read and write, persistence is a key attribute. Yesterday, he revealed that around ‘15 per cent of children in England have reading skills no… Continue reading Paton – tly obvious!
Sadly, Warwick Mansell’s piece in Monday’s Guardian rehearses all those old chestnuts about phonics teaching that have been discredited time without end. Although it makes some pretence at balance, it is shot through with the kind of ignorance about what phonics teaching is that one would normally find in the TES. Mansell tell us that… Continue reading Alas poor Warwick!
In his ‘Personal take on synthetic phonics’, Alexandre V. Borovik sheds some interesting light on how, as a child, he learned to read in Russian, which is written in Cyrillic script, an alphabet writing system. What most interested me about the article was how one day, as a young boy, Borovik, while ‘sitting in a… Continue reading Borovik backs phonics
Continuing the theme I developed yesterday, for pupils operating at a level below or just above their chronological age, we at Sounds-Write strongly believe they will still need a lot of further exposure if they are going to become independent readers and spellers by the time they leave the primary phase. For this reason, we… Continue reading Why the Government is wrong about advocating a time-limited approach to phonics teaching (Part III).
In the last posting, I stated that about thirty to thirty-five percent of children of the sample (average age 7 years and three to four months) I was talking about were not yet more than two years above their chronological age. However, only between two and six percent were below their chronological age.Is the two… Continue reading Why the Government is wrong about advocating a time-limited approach to phonics teaching (Part II).
The question of how long pupils in school should be taught phonics before explicit teaching is dropped is one that has exercised teaching practitioners ever since the expression ‘time limited’ was coined in the Rose review.Since then, many phonics advocates have suggested variously that teaching should conclude at the end of YR, Y1 and Y2.… Continue reading Why the Government is wrong about a ‘time-limited’ approach to phonics teaching (Part I).
