As if Covid didn’t present enough problems – we have noticed a frightening increase in the number of students who have completely disengaged with reading. I blame the pandemic for this because the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey found: ‘some children and young people reported that a lack of access to books (with schools and […]
Read more
I arrived to the school as a new member of staff in September under the banner of Assistant Head teacher for English and (that somewhat abstract concept) literacy. So much drew me to the school but one big driving force was that the school had established itself as a ‘reading school.’ Hours before my interview […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
If you’re new to the role of literacy lead, or just have an interest in approaching Literacy across the school I’d strongly advise beginning your journey with vocabulary – I have written two blogs on this (links below). It makes sense that before students can access texts, we teach them how to access words, and […]
Read more
In this blog, experience primary school teacher and English adviser Shareen Wilkinson (Mayers) explores approaches to teaching vocabulary, focusing on one strategy for explicitly teaching vocabulary in context.
Read more
Award-winning children’s author Christopher Edge shares strategies for talking to children about their reading Books can help children and young adults to make sense of the world, provide an escape from it and maybe, one day, inspire them to build a better one, so in these strange times, making space for reading in their lives […]
Read more
If you’ve already read the previous blog posts in our series to help you prepare for the new Ofsted Education Inspection Framework , you’ll know that how well pupils are taught to read will be prioritised as a main inspection activity in Primary schools from September 2019. But what does the Framework specifically say about phonics? We’ve taken a closer look and pulled out five key things that […]
Read more