All too often, our classroom libraries offer a wonderful selection of fiction but only a limited amount of non-fiction. Why should we ensure that children have access to a wonderful range of non-fiction books? 1. Non-fiction books are fun Firstly, because so many non-fiction books published today are an absolute joy to read. With amazing […]
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How important is it to cultivate the love of reading in children? Decodable books are an essential part of a structured literacy approach, but they have a specific purpose. They are decodable exercises which students can use to practise the phonics skills they have learned. They are not designed to compete with the huge variety […]
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During mental health week, we think it is important to highlight the link between mental health and illiteracy. Illiteracy causes poor life outcomes, poor health, depression and poverty leading to crime. The Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Therapies at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has just reported on the global problem of poor […]
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Although systematic, synthetic phonics teaching programmes are now a mandatory part of the UK National Curriculum for schools, one of the questions we are most frequently asked is still, ‘What are decodable books?’. Phonic Books co-founder, Tami Reis-Frankfort, provides a brief clarification of the meaning of the term, and explains why decodable books are so […]
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Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97-110). New York: Guilford Press. The Reading Rope was developed by Dr. Hollis Scarborough to provide a framework for understanding the different skills that are necessary […]
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By Clair Wilson This article was originally published in the January 2023 issue of Dystinct Magazine. Click here for free access to this issue until December 2024. Reading is one of the most important skills we want our children to learn. We want our children to be able to read books and access information online, […]
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Some years back I worked as a dyslexia specialist in a secondary school. I often had to seek out my students who were attending other lessons. The approach was they they couldn’t be withdrawn from their lessons as they had a right to access the curriculum. Now, these were struggling readers and I always wondered […]
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Synthetic Phonics programmes now talk of ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language […]
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Have you heard of a phonics approach called ‘Speech to Print’? Another name for it is ‘Linguistic Phonics’. This approach is used in a number of programmes: Sounds Write, EBLI and Reading Simplified. The Speech to Print approach starts from the sounds in words (phonemes) and not the spellings (letters or spelling patterns). It follows […]
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Of all the strategies used for teaching reading, I believe that word-building is the most powerful. Why is that? Word-building incorporates two fundamental skills in learning to read: as children build a word, they learn to segment and blend. When we ask children to build a word, e.g., ‘map’ they need to segment the phonemes […]
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