Boosting vocabulary in Year 7 to ease transition

Starting secondary school

In ‘ Bridging the Word Gap at Transition: The Oxford Language Report 2020 ’ the team of researchers found that students transitioning from primary to secondary school are exposed to up to four times as much new vocabulary as at primary school. Compound this with the existing challenges around literacy skills and reading ages, COVID gaps and the emotional challenges of transition and it is easy to […]

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Rethinking marking

I will forever remember the academic year 2020-21. Not for the lockdowns, or the bubbles bursting; not for the lateral flow tests or constant sanitising; not for the masks and visors, or contact tracing. No, as memorable as Covid has been, I will remember, with relish, the year marking as we know it we came […]

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Connecting Through a Class Reader

What Lemov makes clear here is that there is something important happening when we share reading, indeed not a singular something but a whole bunch of somethings.  The complexity of reading has been well documented (Scarborough’s reading rope makes this very clear). Through the reading process, our students are acquiring vocabulary, developing phonological and grammatical […]

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