Spelfabet

Phonics crosswords

I have a student working on vowel spellings who’s keen to do crosswords, so I went looking for ones with words organised by spelling pattern.

I found lots of crosswords in the book “Activities for Successful Spelling – the essential guide” by Philomena Ott.

I’ve had this book for a long time, but I found incorrect information in the introduction e.g. it says “oo” as in “cook” and “oo” as in “pool” are diphthongs, and that some people are auditory learners, others kinaesthetic learners etc, so I was put off, and after having spent a lot of money on this book, haven’t really used it.

Here’s a crossword from this book:

This crossword provides practice with “ay” as in “bray, betray, jay, hay” etc. So it ticks my “does this activity make a point about spelling?” box. (more…)

Evaluating alternative solutions for dyslexia

Out for a lovely walk in the Melbourne sunshine this afternoon, I was annoyed to see an ad in a milkbar for one of our local literacy snake oil vendors. Sigh.

This probably primed me to notice in my overcrowded inbox that UK blogger John Breakwell has recently written about a “Skeptics in the Pub” talk by Dorothy Bishop.

Bishop is Professor of Neurodevelopmental Neuropsychology at Oxford, and was talking about how to evaluate treatments for dyslexia, in order to identify treatments that are likely to work, and not waste money or time on snake oil.

The blog post in turn links to a great 2011 video by Prof Bishop on the same topic, which I can’t believe I haven’t seen before. Here it is. Worth watching.

If you want a copy of Prof Bishop’s overheads, or a summary of her talk, click here.

Melbourne Sounds Write training

On 19-22 January 2015, I’ll be playing local host to the first Sounds~Write linguistic phonics training to be held in Melbourne.

Most of this course will be presented by the very nice and rather hilarious Mary Gladstone from NSW, who is currently the only Sounds Write trainer in eastern Australia. Mary has 38 years’ teaching experience and a Diploma of Specific Learning Difficulties (Dyslexia), so what she doesn’t know about teaching literacy can be written on the head of a pin. Here she is demonstrating a technique at the Sounds~Write training I attended in Perth earlier this year:

I’ve also just confirmed that the last day of this course will be presented by John Walker, one of the UK authors of Sounds~Write. So in the unlikely event that someone does find a question on the head of a pin that Mary can’t answer, John will be able to answer it. You can hear John and others talk about Sounds~Write on video by clicking here, and there’s lots of other information about the program on the Sounds~Write website.

I’m not planning to make money from this course, just provide local teachers and interested others with access to this evidence-based linguistic phonics training, and thank John, Mary and DSF in Perth for waiving my course fee when I did this training earlier in the year (airfare + accommodation + missed work days + course fee would have made it prohibitive).

I’m also considering becoming a Sounds~Write trainer myself, because I think it’s exactly the kind of tried-and-true course for teachers we need running here in Victoria on a regular basis.

Interest in the Melbourne course has come from further afield than I’d expected, with people registering from as far away as Canberra.

There are still places available in this 30-place course, but if you want one of them, please register soon. (more…)