The school classroom is an amazing place. It is simultaneously filled with dazzling complexity and profound simplicity. It is at once driven by reassuring routines and constant surprises. As all pupils return to classrooms from the vagaries of the third lockdown this coming week, it will time for teachers to
My nine-year old boy, Noah, has been working hard on his handwriting this week. He fizzes with ideas when he writes, but most often his handwriting and his spelling simply cannot keep up. You can see the sheer physicality of his writing as shifts and squirms on his chair: each
Do you know your fronted adverbials from your prepositional phrases? As another week of home schooling commences, many parents, and teachers, are faced with tricky questions about grammar. It inspires feisty debate on social media and in school staffrooms. From world-renowned authors, PHD possessing parent-writers, to national leaders, everyone has
When I started teaching nearly two decades ago, I was a teacher of reading, writing, vocabulary, academic talk, and more. The problem was that I could do reading and writing, but I had little idea how to systematically teach the development of these vital skills. Yes – I could model some
What connections can you make between these words? Are there any patterns of meaning or word families you notice? Could you even detect the author who penned these words? These disembodied words are drawn from the Charles Dickens classic, ‘A Christmas Carol’. I have used the word cloud as a
Every teacher recognises the vital role of academic vocabulary to access the school curriculum and go onto succeed. Put simply, the more words you know, the further you’ll go. Words are crucial tools to crow-bar open the curriculum for every pupil and they provide the means for self-expression and
DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) or ERIC (Everyone Reads in Class) are very common approaches to independent reading that occur each week in countless schools. They are part of the fabric of the school day and can prove a cornerstone of a rich reading culture. The rationale for implementing sustained
What if tools commonly used in the classroom threaten to inhibit the learning they were developed to support? Too often, a well-meaning teaching tool can get detached from the thinking which made it useful and so its original ingredients for learning are long lost. Commonly, after a couple of years,
“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Matthew, 25:29 Six months ago everything changed. Covid-19 crashed into our consciousness and schools were closed for all but a
Ch-ch-changes. After the trials and tribulations of the summer of 2020, renewed calls are being made to transform education and change how assessment is enacted in schools. For experienced teachers, it is a familiar refrain. In the Guardian, Melissa Benn has asked teachers and policy makers to “recognise the unique
When I was growing up I sought out books that mirrored my world. I can name the narratives that walked me through my tortured teens, or those books that helped me attempt proper adulting. From each reading, familiar character became both a reflection and a fragment of myself. When I
‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it ‘t ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it ‘t ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it And that’s what gets results’ Ella Fitzgerald