I know that many teachers will not appreciate me starting this hare, especially when we, at Sounds-Write, have coded lots of words with split spellings and, to boot, we also have a terrific lesson for teaching them, but I wanted to give us something to think about. Having said that, I want to state firmly… Continue reading Why the split spelling cracks me up
Did you listen to Michael Rosen’s Radio 4 programme ‘Word of Mouth’ on Tuesday afternoon? This one in the series was about the alphabet and, as is usual in these programmes, Michael had invited two academics – Dr Laura Wright and Professor Nils Langer – to talk about the subject. Langer got the ball rolling by making… Continue reading By word of mouth to the alphabet
Why is it that some schools are able to successfully teach every child to read but the majority still don’t? This was the question posed by Dr Derrie Clark in an interview with Jan Hilary, who was until recently head of St George’s C. of E. Primary School in Wandsworth, when they met at this year’s Reading Reform Foundation conference. You… Continue reading Jan Hilary, head teacher extraordinaire!
This post is a companion piece to the previous one ‘Learning to read made éśé!’ Today I want to deal with the claim that the notion of ‘silent letters’ can in some way assist children in learning to read because the authors of ‘Learning to read made easy’ seem have made this one of… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé II: the nonsense of silent letters
I have just read about and watched the latest in a long line of doomed attempts to solve the problem of the complexities of the English alphabetic code. It’s called ‘Learning To Read Made Easy’ and you can get a flavour of it here. Like its predecessors, it is doomed because the authors don’t understand… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé!
A couple of weeks ago I came across a piece by Kelli Sandman-Hurley in Edutopia entitled ‘Teaching Syllables Can Mask Meaningful Morphemes’. In the article, which you can read here, Sandman-Hurley starts by asking how many times you’ve seen the word ‘every’ spelled as ‘evry’. This is indeed a close approximation of what we hear when we are speaking normally in conversation. On the… Continue reading Teaching syllables or morphemes? Why Sandman-Hurley is mistaken
I haven’t posted on the Scripps Spelling Bee event for some time now – since 2011 in fact. As in so many previous competitions, thiswas a nail-biter to the end and finished in a tie. It’s the second tied win in two consecutive years. Prior to 2014, there hadn’t been a tie for fifty-two years. In the… Continue reading Scripps Spelling Bee 2015
Sounds-Write is very proud to be able to make public this testimonial from Mrs Janet Hilary, headteacher of St George’s Church of England Primary School in London. I recommend Sounds-Write to every teacher and school leader I meet. At St. George’s, where deprivation levels are extremely high, we achieve consistently outstanding results in all phases.… Continue reading Our wonderful testimonial from Jan Hilary of St George’s C of E Primary School
‘Phonics,’ wrote Diane McGuinness, in her superb book Early Reading Instruction ‘is a problematic word.’ Never was there a truer thing said! Why? Because ‘phonics’ is an umbrella term for all kinds of approaches, some good and some fair-to-middling-grim. According to McGuinness, the ‘classification is unsatisfactory because it does not identify the critical difference in… Continue reading Sound to print: the appliance of science
There are a number of reasons why I think that phonic programmes that advocate the use of flash cards are barking up the wrong tree. The use of flash cards is a legacy of old fashioned phonics programmes, which emphasise the visual/graphemic at the expense of the aural. Presenting children with flash cards, which are… Continue reading Why doesn’t The Literacy Blog advocate the use of flash cards?