If there’s one thing The United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) never misses, it’s the opportunity to attack approaches to teaching all children to read and spell successfully and from the moment they enter school. Of course, I’m talking about good quality phonics approaches and, in particular, linguistic phonic approaches, such as Sounds-Write or Fiona Nevola’s… Continue reading The LB gives UKLA F for PSC
We’re coming up to the second phonics screening check in June and already I hear sounds (no pun intended) of anxiety whispered in school corridors and teaching rooms. Of course, if teachers have been doing what they should have been trained to do, there wouldn’t be a problem and everyone would relax. The screening check is… Continue reading Phonics screaming 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.
On a number of different occasions (here, here, with kind permission from Debbie Hepplewhite, and here) I’ve blogged about the introduction of nonsense words into the government’s ‘Phonics screening check’ and, I hope, have answered some of the objections made by (mostly) the whole language lobby. Well, the other day I noticed that the eagle-eyed… Continue reading Spelfabet’s sound sense on nonsense!
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
There was a very interesting (and very muddled) piece in the Times yesterday on the subject of the sounds of the English language and its spelling conventions. The story begins with former investment banker Jaber Jabbour sitting on an aeroplane reading the safety instructions and wondering why two languages, in this case Portuguese and English,… Continue reading Jaber whacky!
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
Thanks to L W-B
If you happened to have bought the Sun newspaper last Sunday, you will doubtless have read Nick Gibb’s piece (pp14 – 15) ‘The teachers aren’t letting down kids… it’s [the] methods of teachers’. In the article, Gibb claims that one in ten boys leave ‘primary school with the reading age of a seven-year-old or worse’.… Continue reading Brazil nuts about education!
