For children to comprehend a text, they need to read it fluently. If the reading is disfluent, the reader will struggle to hold onto all the information needed to comprehend a sentence or paragraph. We know that reading fluency has three components: Accuracy – children need to be able to read words accurately. If they […]
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It is not uncommon for reading interventionists to encounter students who try to use words within words as a spelling strategy. Some teachers may think that helping students remember how to spell a word that they can already spell, e.g., the word ‘hat’, may be useful to teach the word ‘that’. They then teach the […]
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Scarborough’s Reading Rope is a wonderful theoretical framework for describing the complexity of reading and what we need to teach children in order for them to become fluent readers who can comprehend a text successfully. Decoding is on one strand of the rope, and language comprehension is on the other strand. These strands become increasingly […]
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Stanilas Dehaene, a leading neuroscientist, has researched how the brain learns. He has summarised his findings with the ‘four pillars of learning’. The first pillar is attention. Without attention we can’t learn. We need to focus on what is being learnt in order to absorb it. BUT – before attention – comes motivation. We need […]
Read MoreTami Reis-Frankfort, one of the founders of Phonic Books, has been thinking of how to organise a complex Alphabetic Code. *** The English Alphabetic Code is complex. How can we help children learn a code that has 176+ spellings for 44 sounds that uses only 26 letters of the alphabet? If we understand the Alphabetic […]
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If asked, many early years and special school teachers would probably say that one of the first things children should learn is to recognise, and later write, their name. One single word, yet many children seem to find this difficult and it can take a surprisingly long time to achieve. The main reason for this […]
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“My child gets 10/10 on their spelling tests but then forgets their spellings when free writing.” This is a statement that I often hear from parents. In schools, children typically get a weekly spelling list which they practise and then get tested on at a single word level. The next week, they receive a new […]
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What do we mean by ‘sound it out’ and what does it entail? When a child gets stuck on a word we often remind them to ‘sound it out’. As fluent readers, we assume this is very straightforward. We recognise these words automatically and skip all the stages that beginner readers need to go through […]
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“Let’s make learning fun!” I always do a silent inner eye roll when I hear that phrase. The exclamation is loaded. Loaded with unspoken messages. The first message is that whatever we are currently doing with our pupils must be as dull as ditch water and needs jazzing up. We are urged to bring ‘magic’ […]
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We all mispronounce words from time to time, especially when they are unfamiliar to us. Speech and Language Pathologist Miriam Fein explores the important link between pronunciation and the development of vocabulary. Every once in a while someone starts a thread on Twitter about words that they mispronounced for a long time because they only encountered […]
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