Time Skill level Example words targeted 8.45am to 9.45am Beginners: VC and CVC words. at, in, hop, bus, red, fan, big 10.15am-11.15am Adding common suffixes to base words, doubling final consonants as needed. Introducing three “long” vowels with consonant-e/split/silent final e spellings, and when to drop final e before adding a suffix. NB if you […]
A local school leader recently contacted me ask that my colleagues and I delete one of the recommendations we often put in assessment reports, because it is prompting parents to question the school’s teaching approach. The recommendation reads: (Child name) should not be taught using a ‘whole language’ or ‘balanced literacy’ approach (Reading Recovery, Leveled […]
Australians will soon vote on whether to recognise our First Peoples in our Constitution, and set up a permanent indigenous advisory committee (Voice) to Federal Parliament. An estimated 40 per cent of indigenous Australian adults have minimal English literacy, and it can be as high as 70 per cent in many remote areas. According to […]
It’s too late to find out a child is struggling to read and write in Year 3. The horse has bolted. It’s no longer possible to provide effective, cost-effective early intervention. Intervention is harder, less effective and more expensive. The damage done to a child’s confidence and motivation can be even harder to undo. Why […]
I’ve made three very short videos (each under 90 seconds) showing how lots of long words are built by adding prefixes and suffixes to base words. The tiles depicted are from the Spelfabet Moveable Alphabet and Affixes, many of which flip over, making it easy to demonstrate juncture changes e.g. how ‘y’ changes to ‘i’ […]
I’ve finally found time to summarise the sessions I attended on the last day of the SSSR conference. Here’s what I learnt (sorry if I’ve misunderstood anything). Parent advocacy about literacy in preschools Dr Stacey Campbell from Queensland University of Technology said preschool teachers report increasing pressure from parents to teach literacy skills. She collected […]
Thanks for the nice feedback about my SSSR conference Day 1 blog post, it’s helped motivate this one. Here are summaries of what I attended on the second day (any errors/misunderstandings are my own). Neural deficits in dyslexia Dr Tracy Centanni of the university of Florida talked about two genes on Chromosome 6 – KIAA0319 […]
The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
