Moving on from yesterday’s posting, Rosenshine’s third principle focuses on establishing connections between what is currently being learnt and what has been learnt before. In conjunction with reformulating, summarising, elaborating and so on, constantly making connections with prior learning has been shown to aid later retrieval greatly. Carefully scaffolded presentations, followed by plenty of opportunity to… Continue reading Barack Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of direct instruction’ – 2

While in Australia, I managed to get hold of the DSF(Dyslexia -SPELD Foundation) Bulletin (Vol 46) extolling the virtues of John Hattie and Barak Rosenshine. In her piece in the Bulletin ‘Improving achievement … What does the research tell us?’ Mandy Nayton quotes from Rosenshine’s article ‘Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All teachers Should… Continue reading Barak Rosenshine’s principles of direct instruction

Someone called Robert has added a comment to my post ‘Masha Bell rings the wrong note on reading’. In it, he is objecting to the emphasis I made on the fact that many teachers say that letters ‘make’ sounds when they do no such thing. He thinks that this detracted from my argument in the posting… Continue reading Why letters don’t ‘make’ sounds.

This week’s New Scientist has an opinion piece by Tom Bennett on the subject of neuromyths that ‘badly need debunking’. First up for unmasking is the idea that people are right or left-brained. This belief has been around since Robert Sperry of CalTec noticed when treating epileptics that, if the two hemispheres of the brain… Continue reading Neuromyths debunked

I’m just back from Perth in Australia, where I’ve been running two back-to-back courses with Mary Gladstone, our resident Sounds-Write trainer based in Lismore, near Brisbane. We had a terrific time with our animated trainees. It must be the weather! Their winter, when I arrived, was warmer than our ‘summer’, even if the sun does… Continue reading Sounds-Write in Western Australia

Last year I reported on St George’s CE Primary School’s success – they achieved a magnificent 96.5% success rate in the phonics screening check. St George’s is in Wandsworth, where the average pass rate was 66%. Painting of St George’s slaying the non-word monster Vap, with Janet Hilary looking on! There is little doubt what… Continue reading St George’s triumph over screening check!

At the moment the US is experiencing what the Thomas B. Fordham Institute call ‘the anti-testing backlash’.Here, Kathleeen Porter-Magee and Jennifer Borgioli demolish the four biggest myths proliferated by the anti-testing movement. Thanks once again to Susan Godsland for spotting this.

Department for Education Monitoring of 959T Systematic Synthetic Phonics Training Report Date of Visit: 28th & 30th January 2013 Venue Visited: Learning Centre, Park Road, Hindley, Wigan, WN2 3RY Training Provider: Sounds-Write Ltd. Lead contact: Garry Phillipson   garry@sounds-write.co.uk Trainers: John Walker, Lala Worrall Course: SWC5 Course Duration: 09.00-16.00 (for 5 sequential days)* No of attendees:… Continue reading Ofsted monitoring report on Sounds-Write training – an inspector calls

The Magic Beltseries is the latest offering from the Phonicbooks stable. It is promoted as being a ‘catch-up’ series of twelve books for 8-14-year-olds ‘who would benefit from starting a phonics course from the beginning’. It covers the structures at word level from CVC, through CVCC and CCVC to CCVCC, as well as the consonant… Continue reading The Magic Belt series from Phonicbooks

As a boy, I often enjoyed reading G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown’s stories. So, when I noticed there was a programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday entitled ‘Scoring Father Brown’, I decided to tune in to listen to what it was all about. According to the trail on the Radio 4 website, the programme was about ‘a unique exploration… Continue reading Music, Father Brown and phonics teaching