What was more dangerous for sailors in centuries past: pirates, crushing canon, or storms and shipwrecks? The greatest scourge of sailors in the 16th and 18th centuries was… a lack of vitamin C. Scurvy – a dietary deficiency caused by a lack of vitamin C – resulted in an estimated 2 million deaths in between …
“Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world.” Steven Stahl (2005) Developing vocabulary knowledge is so much more than word lists and student-friendly definitions. Even the most careful curation of vocabulary on a knowledge organiser may only give the …
Should the title be ‘sophisticated vocabulary’, or could it be more simply ‘fancy words’? Small but significant language choices like these occur repeatedly in classrooms – and in pupils’ minds – daily. Teaching pupils to use sophisticated vocabulary can go wrong but it is a necessary bump in the road of pupils’ language development. We …
The Problem with Teaching Sophisticated Vocabulary Read More »
Take a read of this passage, entitled ‘An Encounter at Sea’, from the 2017 reading comprehension SATs paper. Can you predict what happens next? What did you predict? Did you assume the ‘encounter’ was a dolphin (noting their mention in paragraph 2), perhaps a shark attack (for the ‘Jaws’ aficionados), or even a whale (‘Moby …
Developing Skilled Readers (Knowledge + Strategy) Read More »
What do you assume are the skills of a successful art and design pupil? Perhaps you consider an understanding of perspective and proportion, colour and tone, or knowledge of different media, all deployed with creativity. We know pupils must do some writing in art and design, but it doesn’t *really* matter so much, right? Though …
A new school year begins, full of old routines and new challenges. It is only natural to seek out novel ideas to start the year afresh, but we should be wary they are not at the expense of long-held priorities and practices. The teaching of academic vocabulary is one of those priorities that still matters. …
If you can write well, you can succeed in school. But the impact of being unable to write with confidence can be crippling, in the classroom, as well as far beyond the school gates. The recent White Paper on ‘levelling up’ education by the government, predictably attempts to address writing and the age-old ‘3Rs’. By …
