By former DfE Assistant Director, Vanessa Pittard I recently led a session with Derbyshire schools on mastery teaching. Derbyshire is a rural county, like many in England. This group of primary headteachers and maths leads included several people from schools with mixed-age classes: a fact of life for many rural schools. No surprise therefore that […]
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Head Teacher of Yarborough Academy, Hannah Albery, shares the journey of changing the maths culture in her school. “…this was mastery, but it also transcended everything. It was just good maths teaching. And, for me, that’s what mastery is. Teaching for understanding. And, that’s what Numicon gives us.” When the new curriculum came into place, […]
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Happy June, everyone! We hope you’re all having a magical summer so far. This month’s reading list is all about – you guessed it – marvellously magical tales to keep the little ones reading over the summer months. So, let’s take a (magic) wand-er through this spell-binding book list that will capture any child’s heart! […]
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Welcome to the first of our monthly recommended reading lists! Between exams, end-of-year preparations and more sunshine than we know what to do with, we hope your month hasn’t been filled with too much ‘may-hem’. The May reading list is kicking off with our top ten superhero tales – guaranteed to help children’s imaginations soar. […]
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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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