My old friend Alan Gibbons, writer of what I would describe as teen fiction, has just sent an email publicising his new book, An Act of Love. You can see a video synopsis of it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq98Fant39MIf it’s anything like the Shadow of the Minotaur, it’ll be a good ‘un!You can read more about Alan… Continue reading An Act of Love
Two days ago the Evening Standard underscored exactly how serious the problem of illiteracy is in London. Its report, which confined itself to the situation in the capital, claimed that: one in four children is ‘practically illiterate when they leave school’; that there are ‘one million adults in the capital who cannot read with confidence’;… Continue reading Reading and writing as Standard
Apologies for the not posting in the past couple of weeks! I’ve been on my travels as well as training teachers in Sounds-Write. While I was away, I got talking to an Italian advisory teacher for early years who specialises in helping children with reading and writing difficulties. A practitioner of some thirty years’ experience,… Continue reading The case for import controls
Over Easter, I was very excited to get hold of a copy of David Crystal’s Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, the book to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the British Library. As the blurb says, the book is ‘the first history of the language to be fully illustrated with readable images… Continue reading Crystalography
There was an acknowledgement on kitchen table math yesterday of the huge importance of deliberate practice in teaching. As I wrote in my reply to the posting: ‘I’ve been banging on about Ericsson’s work for ages. Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich and Hoffman produced The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance in 2006, since which… Continue reading Deliberate practice
Last week I criticised the reporting in the TES of the government-commissioned Tickell report for its zeal in attempting to discredit phonics as an approach to teaching young children to read. The latest offering from the TES (Friday 8th April) is more subtle in its disingenuousness. It plays cleverly on what it senses – I… Continue reading Embedded phonics? What embedded phonics?
When I went to see Nick Gibb eighteen months ago at the House of Commons, he indicated that, if the Conservatives won the next election, he and Michael Gove would do two things. The first would be to invite providers of phonics programmes to submit themselves to a revised [The last government introduced the idea.]… Continue reading The G-Men come good
Olivia O’Sullivan’s ‘beef’ with synthetic phonics in the ‘Insight’ column of the TES is, she says, after examining ‘hundreds of writing samples’, observing lessons and interviewing teachers and children, that she found that some – she doesn’t say how many – children who had spelling difficulties ‘did not seem to notice many of the visual… Continue reading Not much Insight from Olivia O’Sullivan
Not content with traducing phonics on its front page, the TES also decided to devote their ‘Insight’ section of Friday’s paper (page 25) to Olivia O’Sullivan in order to do another caricature. O’Sullivan has penned a piece entitled ‘Wood a child tawt to reed using phonix alone notis anything wrong with this hedline?’ Like the… Continue reading Wud a litrasy expurt no a gud cwalitee phonix program if thay sore won?
I’ve long thought that, when it comes to the teaching of reading and spelling, the TES simply hasn’t got a clue what it is talking about. Never does it miss the opportunity to denigrate the teaching of phonics, even though the evidence in favour of a phonics approach is overwhelming. Yesterday (Friday 1 April 2011),… Continue reading Tickelled pink?