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
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
The following are the ‘top 100 hundred high frequency words’, as listed in Letters and Sounds. Word sounds spellings Notes the /th/ /schwa/ or /ee/, depending on context [ th ] [ e ] and /a/ /n/ /d/ [ a ] [ n ] [ d ] a /a/ /ae/ or /schwa/, depending on context… Continue reading Decoding the top 100 high frequency words
This post is a continuation of and companion to the last. As I’ve written on numerous occasions, high frequency words are just that: high frequency: that is, they occur frequently in children’s texts. However, occurring frequently in texts does not mean they have to be taught ‘by sight’. Once a child has learned to segment… Continue reading How to teach any HFWs (part II)
Here’s another one I heard in the classroom recently. A teacher was teaching her children the sound /ow/, as in ‘cow’, and a member of the class came up to the whiteboard to write the word. After the child had written the first spelling and said the sound, the teacher told the child to write… Continue reading A good time to start using letter names
A subject I keep coming back to is the ‘nature’ of the English writing system. I keep doing this because lack of understanding of how the sounds of the English language relate to the spelling system causes so many, (particularly) academics, to arrive at the most absurd and reactionary conclusions about how to teach it.… Continue reading ‘Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own’ (Henry IV, Pt I)
For years we have been handed excuses by schools for failing to teach their children basic literacy: ‘We’ve got lots of boys in the class’. ‘Many of the children have summer birthdays’. ‘A majority of our children are from very poor backgrounds’. ‘Lots of our children don’t speak English as a first language’. Time and… Continue reading ‘The best that we can be’
This post has been written as a quick response to a debate on Twitter about whether teachers should be teaching letter names or sounds or both to young children just embarking on learning to read and spell. Until young children (Reception/Y1) are secure with sounds – i.e. they understand that letters are representations of… Continue reading Letter names or sounds?
