Sorry Cassius, I posted my last posting before I saw your message. You might find this posting helpful.

Good spellers make good readers but not all good readers make good spellers. I was doing some tests with an nine year old last week, on the Vernon Graded Word spelling he mispelt “young” as “yung” and “honey” as “hony” he then went back and changed both to their correct spelling. When he had complet...

Hi Morrice 166, like Felicity many critics of Synthetic Phonics and the Clackmannanshire research made a big thing out of the supposedly weaker comprehension scores at the end of primary 7, on average the Clackmannanshire children were scoring three and a half months above their chronological ages o...

I’ve been working with a nine year old boy who had a serious phonological processing problem. He was reading two years below his chronological age. When I retested him after 6 months he was reading and spelling 6 months above his chronological age. As well as the standardised reading and spelling te...

Ritalin is part of the modern phenomena known as the quick fix. When I started teaching over 30 years ago ADHD and its henchman ritalin were unheard of, now it’s an epidemic that sweeps our classrooms. If they saw my year 8 pupil lying sleeping on his desk in the afternoon so drugged out with Ritali...

I know that not everyone who posts on our message board agrees with the concept of dyslexia and I would accept that there are all sorts of difficulties in the way the professionals go about diagnosing the condition which only further complicates the issue. Dr.Sally Shaywitz , author of “Overcoming D...

What is going on? do teachers, heads of faculties and schools in general develop strategies in order to cope with children who cannot read? - do these strategies include 'differentiated materials' 'life skills' courses - or am I being just horrible? Hi Pat, what usually happens in Secondary school i...

What method is best for my child? How will I know?

There is no single way to teach reading.

Different children may need different methods.

Forget about the Rose Report. Same old Basic Skills Agency. Some things never change.

If children don’t learn to read at school bad behaviour follows very quickly as sure as night follows day. Discipline becomes a huge problem. How do you cope with school if you can’t read? Usually you become a class clown to cover up your sense of shame and hurt. Here’s what Margaret Bishop author o...

A two-stage approach was adopted in a 10-year study involving individual and group testing of over 7,000 children every year. First, by a comprehensive early intervention programme at pre-school and early primary, we would raise standards and reduce the numbers experiencing reading failure. Secondly...

I remember once hearing that the primary purpose of IEP’s was to cover backs and ensure that no one in authority got into trouble.

Thanks anicka for the great work that you are doing, not only a great advertisement for Jolly Phonics but a great advertisement for the teaching profession.

Hi Iks, first the good news, I manage a unit for older children ( 11-16 ) who have statements, the weakest have reading ages under 6 but by the end of the year they have all learned to read. I use a Synthetic Phonics methodology and I have two excellent Learning Support Assistants who give daily hel...

I know that the work being done by Dr. Tommy Mackay in West Dunbartonshire has been flagged up before on our message board but I felt that this piece in Literacy Today makes for informative and interesting reading. This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Literacy Today (issue no. 38)....

Vandalism , pure and simple. It dresses itself up as kindness to the kids, as deliverance from stale tradition, as democratic resistance to cultural imperialism, but it proceeds by denying access to the best of everything to those who have the worst of nothing, and its consequence is devastation….Pi...