Here are some handy comprehension resources and simple ideas to share with parents to help them support their children’s reading comprehension during school closures.
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Super authors, super accessible, simply super-readable fiction for KS3/11-14 Written by award-winning authors and developed in partnership with Barrington Stoke, the experts in producing accessible fiction, Super-Readable Rollercoasters aim to encourage less-confident readers and support them to become life-long readers. With findings from the latest Word Gap report by Oxford University Press showing that pupils may have read less widely for pleasure during lockdown, these new titles […]
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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 […]
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Sarah Eggleton: Continuing from the previous blog – ‘Closing the word gap – introducing a whole school approach’ this blog will explain how we moved from staff delivering key words in lessons to enabling teachers and students to engage with and interrogate vocabulary to get a genuine deep understanding of it. What we wanted to […]
Read more Sarah Eggleton: Following on from my previous two posts regarding developing a consistent approach to closing the word gap in the English classroom, I’m pleased to share how we moved from English to a whole school approach to explicit vocabulary teaching. Experience has taught me that when moving to implement a Literacy strategy the overwhelming […]
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For almost 6 months students have lived a range of experiences, positive and negative, during the lockdown period. English is not a linear subject and is taught by building upon what is already understood, by securing and reinforcing key skills and concepts in a range of contexts and through a variety of texts, says Katie […]
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It is safe to say that there will be a pressing urge to ‘get back to normal’ when schools resume. However, it will be important to make space for recovery work: the conversations, routines, and relationships that help a school flourish. It is also important to remember that there is likely to be a wider […]
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‘A Sea of Talk’ Helen Prince considers some of the educational challenges facing schools and offers her advice for encouraging developing vocabulary across the curriculum. Responding to a pandemic was not part of my teacher training. Dashing around Christ Church, Canterbury all those years ago, I remember no module on understanding the challenge of students […]
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It started with a book… Closing the Vocabulary Gap by Alex Quigley is the book that started the Stretford High School English Department’s endeavour to improve our students’ vocabulary. Quigley opened the dialogue for a problem we knew existed but weren’t sure how to solve. His book clarified the classification of words we needed students […]
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Anhydrous, exothermic, fullerene, isomerase, medulla, monomers, ribosomes, titration, xylem… How many of these words do you know? For a scientist – or even a knowledgeable GCSE science student, no less – this list of complex words will trigger a wealth of background knowledge. For many pupils, however, the same list of words would likely provoke […]
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