My nine-year old boy, Noah, has been working hard on his handwriting this week. He fizzes with ideas when he writes, but most often his handwriting and his spelling simply cannot keep …
Flipping Fronted Adverbials
Do you know your fronted adverbials from your prepositional phrases? As another week of home schooling commences, many parents, and teachers, are faced with tricky questions about grammar. It inspires feisty debate …
Five Things I Wish I’d Known About Literacy
When I started teaching nearly two decades ago, I was a teacher of reading, writing, vocabulary, academic talk, and more. The problem was that I could do reading and writing, but I …
Working Words into Writing
What connections can you make between these words? Are there any patterns of meaning or word families you notice? Could you even detect the author who penned these words? These disembodied words …
Academic Vocabulary and Schema Building
Every teacher recognises the vital role of academic vocabulary to access the school curriculum and go onto succeed. Put simply, the more words you know, the further you’ll go. Words are crucial …
Do We Need to Sort Out Silent Reading?
DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) or ERIC (Everyone Reads in Class) are very common approaches to independent reading that occur each week in countless schools. They are part of the fabric of …
Is it time to KO the Knowledge Organiser?
What if tools commonly used in the classroom threaten to inhibit the learning they were developed to support? Too often, a well-meaning teaching tool can get detached from the thinking which made …
Covid-19 and the Literacy ‘Matthew Effect’
“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Matthew, 25:29 Six …
What do teachers really care about?
“You know, when you find yourself having to raise your voice, and your heart starts pounding, and you start realizing that things are not going the way you had planned, it’s a …
Transform Education and Assessment (Just Not Yet)
Ch-ch-changes. After the trials and tribulations of the summer of 2020, renewed calls are being made to transform education and change how assessment is enacted in schools. For experienced teachers, it is …