Absolutely spot on Susan, Secondary school reform begins in the early years in the Primary Sector. Having a zero tolerance policy to teaching all children to read irrespective of social class and a commitment to training all our primary teachers the theory and the practical skills they need to do th...

If a beginning reader has a problem learning to read in a classroom where they use a searchlight model to teach reading the likelihood is that his problems usually don’t get spotted until year 4 when the type of text being used becomes more challenging . Then he simply gets more of the same strategi...

Many thanks to Debbie, Susan and Mr. H. for all their hard work. The e-bulletin looks and reads really well.

Susan, you are a gem. I honestly don't know how you do it.

Over the last six months I have been doing some work with a little girl who was eight last month. She had been pretty messed up by how her school taught her to read and she just kept on getting more of the same memorising high frequency words, repetitive , predicable texts and guessing the rest. I’v...

Alphabetic reading is what little ones do when they are using the code to read in a very deliberate way. For me this is the “Learning to Read” stage which all children must go through in order to arrive at the orthographic stage which is the automatic stage of “Reading to learn”. To get from the Alp...

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...