More news from npr in the USA. One of the latest pieces the station has run is with the new Secretary for Education, Arne Duncan. You’ve heard of ‘Education, Education, Education’ but Arne has $100 billion to spend across the education spectrum! It’s the ‘civil rights issue of our generation’, he says, and the Obama… Continue reading 100 Billion dollars to spend on education!
I have previously written that true literacy tuition is about teaching reading and spelling together because they are inextricably linked. What most children can do when they start their schooling is talk. They are already very accurate at using the grammatical structures of English and have vocabularies running into many thousands of words. David Crystal… Continue reading Support for Spelling (Part 2)
This latest DCSF publication pulls together much traditional thinking about how spelling has been taught in British schools for over a hundred years without providing any evidence that anyone learns to spell as a result of it. From the very beginnings of the development of our compulsory schooling system, spelling was identified as a major… Continue reading DCSF publication: Support for Spelling (released from captivity May 2009)
The literacy blog has just been sent some interesting statistics by Anne Neal, a special educational needs co-ordinator at Stillness Junior School in Forest Hill, Lewisham. She and her inclusion team have been teaching a group of six children three times a week, thirty minutes a session, for seven weeks. She tested all six before… Continue reading London teachers do brilliant job catching up underperforming readers and spellers.
About month ago I reported on Yulkendy Valdez’s attempt to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington DC. Well, sadly, Yulkendy didn’t manage to win. Instead, as broadcast by npr news, Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas triumphed over 292 other participants to take home the competition trophy and a cash prize of $40,000! Somewhat bizarrely,… Continue reading Spelling Bee final won by Kavya from Kansas
This posting arises out of a couple of things I’ve seen recently. The first is very nice piece of video from Teachers TV on the way handwriting is taught in France. The second is intended to anticipate the new publication Support for Spelling by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Quality writing is based… Continue reading Handwriting and spelling
A new skirmish in the so-called ‘reading wars’ has once again broken out. This time in Australia! A group of reading experts has written to the Education Minister Julia Gillard to complain that draft recommendations on the shape of the new English curriculum have omitted significant elements from previous recommendations made in an initial advice… Continue reading Reading experts go in to bat for phonics in Australia
What has been the result of the introduction of the National Strategies, ask the authors of the Policy Exchange report Tom Richmond and Sam Freedman? Despite claims that major improvements have taken place, they claim that ‘… in retrospect it is clear that much of this success was a cruel illusion.’ This is because many… Continue reading The Cruel Illusion
You may have noticed that in the previous posting, I created a link to the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley. This link takes you to the website Children of the Code. As Cartwheel says in a posting on the Reading Reform Foundation, the website is ‘a combination of a book/periodical and a documentary’.… Continue reading Children of the Code
The recently published Rose Report into the primary curriculum draws praise from Vicky Tuck, principal of Cheltenham Ladies College. She believes it highlights a problem educationists have been grappling with for years: ‘word poverty’.‘Word poverty’ refers to the huge deficit in some children’s language skills in comparison with other children. Why would this be? In… Continue reading Now let us praise Jim Rose