By Vanessa Pittard, former Assistant Director at the DfE No single person can take credit for Singapore’s success in the teaching of mathematics, but if I could nominate someone, it would be Berinderjeet Kaur, Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education at Singapore’s National Institute of Education. Along with others, I was lucky enough to hear […]
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Is spelling really that important any more? Especially in the modern world where children are growing up using onscreen documents, emails, texts, all with autocorrect? Unfortunately, as Jerrold Zar illustrates in his poem ‘An Ode to a Spellchecker’, we can’t always trust the computer to spot the ‘Miss steaks aye kin knot sea’. The truth […]
Read more Vanessa Pittard shares expert advice on how to build firm foundations with mastery. I’d like to suggest that one of the benefits of mastery is the avoidance of misery. I’ll focus on primary maths, but what I write here applies as much at KS4/GCSE as to Key Stage 2. What’s the point of introducing mastery […]
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Explore with Biff, Chip and Kipper encourages children to read widely across fiction and non-fiction with 60 engaging, topic-linked pairs of books that open the door to cross-curricular comprehension. And what is the first thing young children notice when they open a new book? No Oxford Reading Tree book would be complete without the illustrations! […]
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Comprehension can be a thorny topic. It is defined as the ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning and involves complex cognitive processes. Problems or weaknesses in any of these elements can be a significant barrier to the reader’s understanding. The job of the teacher is to identify which elements their pupils […]
Read moreThe new Read Write Inc. Book Bag Books are aimed at children between the ages of four and seven years old. As with all our products, our readers are both our biggest fans and our toughest critics, so before any book gets published it gets sent for rigorous trialling. Find out what pupils had to […]
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The long nights are drawing in, the holiday lights are up… what could be better than curling up on the sofa with a mince pie and losing yourself in a thrilling winter classic? To get you into the spirit, we’ve been reflecting on our top five festive tales from TreeTops: Greatest Stories. All five are […]
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Read the Way with Project X: Teaching Thematic Clusters Some of you will know that Project X Origins is structured in thematic clusters of four or five books, but did you know that there are several key benefits to the theme/cluster structure? Read on to find four key ways in which the thematic approach of […]
Read more Why is non-fiction important for reading development? A guest post from Roderick Hunt, MBE Why is it important to widen children’s early reading experience into reading non-fiction and information books? It is because the literate, print-bound world for which children are being educated requires the ability to process information and master the many formats […]
Read more Ofsted has put a fair amount of effort into debunking common myths about inspection. Its response to these, set out on gov.uk [1] and reinforced in the inspection handbook [2] , should offer some comfort to schools choosing to adopt teaching for mastery in mathematics. For example, teachers using textbooks as the basis for lesson planning will […]
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