Unlock the art of writing with my comprehensive blog series. Dive into effective strategies for teaching spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, planning, editing, and much more. Explore disciplinary writing across various subjects. Whether you're a teacher or leader, discover valuable tips and techniques to enhance writing skills. From mastering the basics to refining complex compositions, my curated content offers practical guidance to unleash successful writing for everyone.
Benjamin Franklin may be one of the most interesting people in modern history. Born into poverty, leaving school aged 10, he then became a famed president, inventor, thinker, and writer. His story of teaching himself to write may be a little famous too. Franklin, without a teacher, and with very
Debates about spelling never really go away. No matter what technological advancement is ushered in, it appears that spelling development still matters and we should sustain the teaching of spelling. For young writers in particular, spelling is linked to writing, reading and vocabulary development. But teachers need support to understand
What do you assume are the skills of a successful art and design pupil? Perhaps you consider an understanding of perspective and proportion, colour and tone, or knowledge of different media, all deployed with creativity. We know pupils must do some writing in art and design, but it doesn’t
If you can write well, you can succeed in school. But the impact of being unable to write with confidence can be crippling, in the classroom, as well as far beyond the school gates. The recent White Paper on ‘levelling up’ education by the government, predictably attempts to address writing
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, wine, public order, roads, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they taught us how best to teach writing. Not a week goes by when new apps or AI isn’t promised as the answer to all our educational
There are few topics in education – indeed, English life – that inspire fear, loathing and unfulfilled expectations quite like the subject of grammar. Researchers are quick to challenge notions of ‘standard English’ and how grammar is being taught in primary school, or the tyranny of tests. Sadly, amidst these loud debates,
It is crucial that busy teachers are supported with timely and accessible resources to support their work. As a result, to go alongside my new book, ‘Closing the Writing Gap’, I have produced a small number of tools that I hope will help translate the insights from the book into
Writing a book about teaching writing is a daunting prospect. Sharing the reality that I spent years in the classroom struggling to support weaker writers only adds to the trepidation. What if my teacher knowledge gap wasn’t the norm? What if my attempts to translate practical strategies fell flat?
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
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
A version of this article was originally published in the excellent ‘Teach Secondary‘ magazine – you can subscribe HERE. It is well worth a read! Controversies and complaints about spelling are centuries old. In his Preface to ‘A Dictionary of the English Language’, in 1755, Samuel Johnson derided writers for their