Insights into vocabulary: how schools are closing the word gap

In this blog series, expert voices share their passion and commitment to vocabulary, and tell us how they are narrowing the word gap in their schools. Faculty Head Miranda McDade explains why there is a need to explicitly teach vocabulary alongside reading for pleasure. Read Miranda’s blog Assistant SENDCo, Lucy Bryant offers some practical, simple ways to support […]

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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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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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