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?

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