In his recent call for children to read more books, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has questioned the dominance enjoyed by Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in many schools. I’m sure that a man of Michael Gove’s sophistication wasn’t for a moment suggesting that Steinbeck’s superbly constructed naturalistic novel Of Mice and Men doesn’t deserve a… Continue reading Why Of Mice and Men?
At the end of my latest Sounds-Write course this week, Samantha Rushforth-Willoughby from Stone Church of England School in Aylesbury, came up to me and said: “I feel as though someone has just handed me a pot of gold.” As the training had been spread over four weeks, Sam had had the opportunity to put… Continue reading A pot of gold!
This morning’s Telegraph is reporting that Michael Gove expects that children aged as young as eleven should be reading fifty books a year. Graeme Paton thinks that Gove’s latest ruminations probably reflect his thinking on the tour he’s just made ‘of high-performing “charter schools” – state-funded institutions that are run free of Government interference –… Continue reading Fifty books a year?
There’s a story in the Telegraph this morning declaring that ‘politically correct’ parents who avoid telling their children folk tales are missing the chance ‘to teach children morality’. Some parents, it is alleged, are refusing to read or tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood because it involves a child wandering off alone into… Continue reading If you go down to the woods today, your mother obviously hasn’t been telling you the right kinds of stories
As Richard Garner reported in yesterday’s Independent, apparently, Terry Jones has just written Trouble on the Heath, a book for struggling readers. It’s part of the Quick Read series of books published for World Book Day, and, well intentioned though this is, it’s yet another example of someone who is very, very good at doing… Continue reading And now for something completely… er, the same!
While I agree with Greg Brooks in his piece in the Guardian yesterday, where he argues that changing English spelling simply won’t work, the way in which his argument is couched seems to contradict the initial message. There are, as he points out, forty-four or so sounds – it depends to some extent on accent… Continue reading Greg Brooks: no change in the spelling system! Well, just a bit.
I see the UK Literacy Association have intervened in the debate about the use of non-words in the government’s proposed new reading test for six-year-olds in England. Testing children on non-words, the proviso being that it is made clear to the child that the words being presented are NOT real words, is a very good… Continue reading Non words nonsense
Yesterday’s article in the Huffington Post demonstrates perfectly why reading and spelling are taught so appallingly in the USA and the UK. In her article ‘The Crisis in Education: Let’s Not Wait for Superman’, Dr Marion Blank talks about the problem of illiteracy in schools in the USA and reports a failure rate of between… Continue reading Huffington Post firing on blanks
Over the weekend I saw two sets of parents, both of which are highly educated and middle class and both of which have decided to pay for private tuition in numeracy and literacy for their children. When I asked them why, their reasons were almost identical: in terms of the children’s literacy, they were not… Continue reading Why Children Can’t Read
I know I’m a week late on this but it’s taken me a week to be able to compose a temperate response to the news that Leighton Andrews, the Labour education minister for Wales, has suddenly decided that the pupils of Wales ‘deserve better’ and that what is needed now is to raise standards. After… Continue reading But it’s too late, Leighton now, it’s too late…