At the weekend I was asked to have a look at a child with literacy difficulties. One of the problems she had was that she hadn’t been taught to say sounds precisely. Sounds-Write sets great store in emphasising to teachers the importance of saying sounds properly without adding an /uh / sound after every consonant.… Continue reading The children at St Thomas Aquinas sound all right!
You know what they say? There are lies, damn lies and press reports about the government’s phonics screening check – especially in the Independent. I think Leveson should be instructed to look into journalistic standards at the Independent.The latest, penned pseudonymously by ‘Jennifer Jackson’, has got to be one of the most rebarbative fabrications I have… Continue reading Independent? Only from the truth when it comes to phonics
Once again Mr Verb reminds me that the American Dialect Society, chaired by Ben Zimmer, will soon be plumping for its ‘Word of the Year 2012’. Last year it turned out to be ‘occupy’, a distinctly disappointing decision in my opinion, given the rich choice on offer. I preferred ‘bazinga’, from the ‘Big Bang Theory’.… Continue reading WOTY – Oxford Dictionary style
There’s a report in the Telegraph this morning under the heading ‘School reports: the 15 best school reports submitted to the Telegraph letters page’. As with many of these amusing scraps of reportage, I think we need to exercise a degree of scepticism, as many such stories are likely to be apocryphal. Never mind, the… Continue reading No wonder the whining schoolboy!
Readers of the blog will know that I keep my eye on the USA’s National Public Radio (npr) website for what people are talking about in the world of education. Last week, npr ran a piece on the work of Jim Stigler, a psychology prof at UCLA. As a graduate student back in the 70s,… Continue reading Eastern education: a site of struggle
By kind permission of Debbie Hepplewhite, I am posting, in its entirety, her response on the Reading Reform Foundation to an article by Graeme Paton in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper. Debbie’s post provides an excellent risposte to many of the issues raised in Paton’s piece, titled “Compulsory reading test ‘should be scrapped’” and straplined ‘Bright children are… Continue reading Debbie Hepplewhite confounds screening check critics
The latest issue of teach PRIMARY has just come out and there are two articles (at least) of note that are worth a look at. The first, ‘Good education doesn’t change every time there’s a new secretary of state’, is about Belleville Primary School in Wandsworth. According to Jacob Stow, the head teacher John Grove… Continue reading Clear vision, consistency and effortful practice
While listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, who should pop up but the naturalist Chris Packham? He was deploring what he and David Attenborough see as a loss of interest in nature study. To begin with Packham was saying how unfortunate it was that today’s children seemed content just to sit… Continue reading Back to nature study?
I wrote this post and then thought that it would be easier to listen to than to read, so here’s the link to the audio file. As I was asked to post the transcript, here it is below: In this audio file I’m going to talk about how spellings in English can represent different sounds.… Continue reading One spelling, different sounds
The anti-phonics crackpots have been out again this weekend. On Saturday, Mike Lloyd-Jonesmade me smile when he pointed out the spurious logic of one anti-phonics writer of a letter to the Guardian newspaper. The writer attempted to discredit phonics by using the kind of invented spelling that phonics advocates have by now become used to: ‘fonics’ and… Continue reading Broadcasting grouse!