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?
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