Unlock the art of writing with my comprehensive blog series. Dive into effective strategies for teaching spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, planning, editing, and much more. Explore disciplinary writing across various subjects. Whether you're a teacher or leader, discover valuable tips and techniques to enhance writing skills. From mastering the basics to refining complex compositions, my curated content offers practical guidance to unleash successful writing for everyone.
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, wine, public order, roads, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they taught us how best to teach writing. Not a week goes by when new apps or AI isn’t promised as the answer to all our educational
There are few topics in education – indeed, English life – that inspire fear, loathing and unfulfilled expectations quite like the subject of grammar. Researchers are quick to challenge notions of ‘standard English’ and how grammar is being taught in primary school, or the tyranny of tests. Sadly, amidst these loud debates,
It is crucial that busy teachers are supported with timely and accessible resources to support their work. As a result, to go alongside my new book, ‘Closing the Writing Gap’, I have produced a small number of tools that I hope will help translate the insights from the book into
Writing a book about teaching writing is a daunting prospect. Sharing the reality that I spent years in the classroom struggling to support weaker writers only adds to the trepidation. What if my teacher knowledge gap wasn’t the norm? What if my attempts to translate practical strategies fell flat?
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 up. You can see the sheer physicality of his writing as shifts and squirms on his chair: each
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 on social media and in school staffrooms. From world-renowned authors, PHD possessing parent-writers, to national leaders, everyone has
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 are drawn from the Charles Dickens classic, ‘A Christmas Carol’. I have used the word cloud as a
A version of this article was originally published in the excellent ‘Teach Secondary‘ magazine – you can subscribe HERE. It is well worth a read! Controversies and complaints about spelling are centuries old. In his Preface to ‘A Dictionary of the English Language’, in 1755, Samuel Johnson derided writers for their
In ‘How to Write an Edu-book – Part 1‘, I had the huge pleasure of sharing with everyone the approaches to writing an edu-book from two of the best edu-book writers around, Tom Sherrington and Mary Myatt. In Part 2, I wanted to share my own edu-bookery. It is important to
I often hear the comment “I don’t know how you write books and do the day job“. And well, I usually agree and stumble over some comments about being very tired, but enjoying it anyway. I thought it may be of interest to explore the process more methodically. Perhaps
“This porridge is too hot!” she exclaimed. So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl. “This porridge is too cold,” she said So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge. “Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily and she ate it all up. Every teacher knows the
Thinking about better assessment is not always at the forefront of the mind of a busy English teacher. We are so hassled by marking, planning and well, teaching lots, that we keep our nose to the marking grindstone and, well…just keep on going. More recently, I have been trying