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 The approach was they they couldn’t be withdrawn from their lessons as they had a right to access the curriculum.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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I love the way Christopher Such writes about teaching reading, and if you haven’t read his book The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading – do. I have found it is very accessible and really useful for busy teachers to keep up with recent research into reading instruction. What I like most about his […]
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Ann Sullivan of Phonics for Pupils with Special Educational Needs is an experienced SEND teacher, who has created her own phonics programme specifically for SEND children. This is what she has to say about our latest set of Books: Moon Dogs Extras for Catch-Up Readers. If there is one question I am asked more than […]
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Here at Phonic Books we have been publishing decodable books for beginner and catch-up readers for seventeen years. During those years we attended many conferences and education shows. When discussing whether our books were suited to students with SEND, we always deferred to the teachers working in SEND settings. While we were confident teaching dyslexic […]
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The split digraphs ‘a-e’, ‘e-e’, ‘i-e’, ‘o-e’, ‘u-e’ are very common spellings. They have different names: Silent e, Magic e, Vowel Consonant e, Bossy e, Split digraphs. Many children struggle to read words with these spelling patterns, so we need to teach them explicitly. Why do we have these spelling patterns in English? The ‘e’ […]
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Here we are in the last term of school and soon the summer will be upon us. It is really important that during this summer, the ‘summer slump’ of learning loss will not add to the learning loss that has already impacted so many children during the last two years. A good way to prevent […]
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