Following on from my last post in which I reported the results of a spelling test taken by a class about to begin Y2 in St George’s Primary School in Wandsworth, this time I’m publishing the results from the same spelling test for a class just about to begin Y3. The reason I’m putting the posts… Continue reading The phonics achievement challenge
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 follows on from my last, where I implied that teaching is an extraordinarily specialised job and requires that teachers who teach literacy are very well trained. In this post, I am making the point that, where teachers are well-trained, they produce results that knock your socks off!Way back in December 2010, I published… Continue reading St Thomas Aquinas’s remarkable results
A question I’m often asked in regard to correcting spelling in pupils’ work usually runs along the lines of: My child is in Y3 and the teacher hasn’t corrected such and such a spelling mistake. Is the teacher right and, if not, what should the teacher be correcting? Well, as the writing system in English… Continue reading How to correct common spelling errors
The following lists are provided courtesy of Sarah Donarski’s perspectEd blog. Sarah is an English teacher at Wellington College in Crowhorne in Berkshire. The lists are updated ‘sophisticated spellings’ for GCSE English. Many thanks to Sarah for sharing them! All I have done is to syllabify the words in her lists and, in so doing,… Continue reading Sarah Donarski’s ‘Sophisticated spellings’ syllabified
What do people mean when they talk about ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ spellings? ‘Regular’, as the dictionary definition suggests, means ‘arranged in or constituting a constant or definite pattern, … well ordered, well structured, perpetual, constant…’ The problem is that there is only one constant in the spelling system in English and it isn’t the spellings! It… Continue reading The ill-conceived idea of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ spelling
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?
As the government acknowledges in its document on spelling, throughout the whole of Key Stage 2, teachers ‘should continue to emphasise to pupils the relationship between sounds and letters, even when the relationships are unusual’.The word lists for Years 3 and 4 and for Years 5 and 6 are statutory and, again, in the government’s words, they… Continue reading Statutory Spelling lists syllabified
St George’s – from crisis to calm is the story of a school that twelve years ago was failing, and failing so badly it was in special measures. What that failure meant was that a good number children moving on to secondary school were unequipped to cope with the demands of the secondary curriculum. A huge… Continue reading St George’s Church of England Primary School: from crisis to calm
The allure of using Whole Language to teach children to read lies mainly in the fact that, as you’d expect, humans are heavily biased towards meaning and a whole word approach has an immediate appeal because, at the beginning, it seems so easy. On the other side of the methodological divide, learning how to recognise… Continue reading What are the problems with Whole Language and why doesn’t it work?
