Many teachers are now using decodable books to help their beginner readers practice the phonics taught in classroom lessons. This is because it is now accepted that decodable texts, which are controlled texts, help children develop decoding, and decoding ability is an essential skill for learning to read. It is important that the books match […]
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The verb ‘to dictate’ is not one that teachers warm to. This is because we love to foster creativity in our children and to get them to write their own ideas. BUT when teaching children how to read and spell we need to use all the best tools we have to instruct our beginner readers […]
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When I trained to be a teacher in one of the best universities in London, I learned a great deal about the wonderful world of books, how to select quality picture books and spot racially biased books, and even how to make books by stitching them together by hand. We made book covers using potato […]
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Scaffolding the teaching of multisyllabic words – simple to complex Many teachers are focused on teaching children how to sound out graphemes (spellings) and blend sounds together into words. They will even be teaching children how to manipulate phonemes in phonemic awareness activities. These are all essential underlying skills necessary for learning to read. These activities […]
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Often when I read with a pupil, I need to remind her/him (and myself) to point to the words. As fluent readers we don’t point to words on the page, but sometimes if we come across a difficult or new word we are trying to work out – we will use our finger to work […]
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Beginner readers need a great deal of practice. Where possible, sending home decodable books is an important opportunity for reading practice. It is difficult for the teacher or teaching assistant to hear every child read every day or even every week. So, an adult reading at home with the child has a very significant role […]
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Word chains are really important for all children learning to read, especially those who find reading hard. Some programmes call this activity ‘Sound swap’ (Sounds-Write) or ‘Switch it’ (Reading Simplified). Why word chains are a useful teaching tool Word chains offer children practice of the underlying skills of reading: blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation (adding, […]
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Decodable books have a very specific and limited purpose in the process of learning to read. They provide reading practice as children learn to use the sound/letter correspondences they have been taught and the strategy of blending sounds. As their code knowledge grows, children will be able to apply it to ‘authentic’ texts. Authentic texts […]
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English is complex and we need to teach reading in a structured way, from simple to complex. Unfortunately, there is no avoiding high-frequency words with spellings the children haven’t learnt yet because they are present in even the simplest of sentences, e.g. ‘The cat is on the mat’. In the very first sentences children read […]
Read MoreThe Department for Education has announced that is it ‘retiring’ the ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme which was published in 2007. In its place, it is asking publishers to submit their phonics programmes for revalidation. Initially, the DfE planned to update ‘Letters and Sounds’ but then decided to allow schools to create programmes, based on their […]
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