Developing a schema for learning to read and write I’ve been thinking for some time about the usefulness of schema theory in helping us to understand better how we teach young children to read and spell when they enter school. Let’s start by asking what a schema is. According to Kirschner and Hendrik, a schema… Continue reading Learning to read and write – a schema

Happy Sunday! We are making some more activities available for free. These are for Units 1 to 7 of the Initial Code. They are from our book Help your Child to Read and Write (part 1). We hope you enjoy using them. Let us know how you get on! And, if you use them with… Continue reading More resources to share

During the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m going to re-post some of the blog posts I feel might be most interesting and useful to teachers and to parents. We at Sounds-Write have just started running our new course for students in Years 3 – 6* and, since it covers so much on the terrain… Continue reading David Crystal – a diamond geezer!

Hi all, we are making some resources available for parents and carers that want to support their children with Sounds-Write at home. 1: For children in Reception/ Kindy Free online courses: Help your child to read and write As some of you already know, our two courses Help your Child to Read and Write teach… Continue reading Sounds-Write Phonics Resources for Parents and Carers: COVID 19 update

Morphology is the study of form or structure. In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, of how they are formed and of what their relationship is to other words in the language. English is both synthetic or inflectional and agglutinative or affixing. Both of which can be subsumed under the heading ‘fusional’. Inflectional languages,… Continue reading Should we be teaching phonics or morphology as a first step to teaching children to read and write?

I’m writing this post because I’ve just realised that after over four hundred posts, to my horror, I’ve never talked about Diane McGuinness’s ‘Prototype for teaching the alphabet code’ before. If you want to read it for yourself, you can find it in Early Reading Instruction. Fifteen years ago, amongst the most enthusiastic phonics advocates… Continue reading The beautiful simplicity of McGuinness’s prototype

Have you read Natalie Wexler’s excellent article ‘Writing and Cognitive Load Theory’ in the latest issue (No 4) of researchEd? If you haven’t, it’s well worth a careful look. Natalie is the co-author, with Dr Judith Hochman, of The Writing Revolution, of which I am a great fan. In her researchEd piece, Wexler explains that… Continue reading The building blocks of writing

The other day, I decided to attend a lecture on the Georgian alphabet, which you can view here, to put myself through the extremely challenging exercise of learning more. During the lecture, I and my fellow attendees were introduced to the thirty-three characters that make up the script. All were presented in one single session… Continue reading What the Georgian alphabet can teach us about teaching reading and writing

Here we go again! in the latest issue of Nomanis, Stephen Parker has written an article on how we should be teaching phonics to children entering school. While Stephen offers some very useful advice, there is (at least) one of his recommendations that needs to be studiously ignored: his invocation to teach letter names to… Continue reading Advocating the teaching of letter names to children just entering school is crass