We recently received this kind message from Rebecca Sloane, a teacher at Kingswood School House. “As a special-needs teacher who works with mainly Key Stage 2 children, I’m always looking for materials that not only interest my students but also enable them to practise the early phonics they have missed out on. The Moon Dog […]
Read MoreIn advance of our visit to the USA to the IDA conference in November, we have asked some of the educators using our books their students in the USA to tell us what they think about them. Here are some of their responses.
Read MoreA teacher has written in, sharing written work by struggling readers and writers using the Magic Belt, Totem and Talisman series. We very much appreciate this feedback. Below are the samples of work she has sent in. They include a plot summary, a book review, descriptive writing, figurative language, the rewriting of a story and […]
Read MoreLearning to read, initially, has two components: knowledge: learning the graphemes and the sounds they represent skills: learning to blend sounds into words and segment sounds for spelling. Many teachers offer lots of fun ways to learn graphemes. They do this in step-by-step progression, starting from the simple graphemes and progressing to the more-complex ones. […]
Read MoreRecent results of the Year 1 Phonics Check show that schools in deprived communities can do as well as, if not better than, schools in leafy suburbs. Take St George’s, a school in Wandsworth, which reported 100% success in the Y1 Phonics Check this year. This school is situated in a challenging catchment area. What […]
Read MoreWe were delighted to receive this letter written by children from Fringford Primary School: “Dear Mrs Tweedie, We are children in Year 3 who go to Fringford school. We wanted to tell you that your books are excellent and that we have really enjoyed Series 1 and 2 of the Talisman books. We would love […]
Read MoreThe table below shows a set of results sent to us from a teacher who has used our catch-up range Magic Belt, Totem and Talisman books and workbooks this past year. All her pupils struggled with reading and have various profiles of learning difficulties. These include speech and language difficulties, specific learning difficulties, emotional difficulties […]
Read MoreA tutor wrote in to tell us about her pupil. She has been working with him since December (for five and a half months) using the Sounds-Write programme and the Dandelion Books that complement it. She wrote: “He is in Year 1 and when he came to me at the end of December he had […]
Read MoreWe know that any newly acquired knowledge or skill must to be practised for it to be committed to memory. In order to develop reading fluency, automaticity has to be established. This is brought about through practice and consolidation. Sometimes, teachers worry about boring their pupils by revisiting what they have taught. For many pupils, […]
Read MoreWe received this lovely email this week from Australia: “Hi, We are a private practice of 3 speech pathologists and we just wanted to let you know that the Totem and Talisman Series are awesome!!! Our reluctant readers now love books, some of them finishing a whole series in one day. They have discovered a […]
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