What’s in a name?

Ch ar l ie

If asked, many early years and special school teachers would probably say that one of the first things children should learn is to recognise, and later write, their name. One single word, yet many children seem to find this difficult and it can take a surprisingly long time to achieve. The main reason for this […]

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‘Sound it out’

Reading decodable book

What do we mean by ‘sound it out’ and what does it entail? When a child gets stuck on a word we often remind them to ‘sound it out’. As fluent readers, we assume this is very straightforward. We recognise these words automatically and skip all the stages that beginner readers need to go through […]

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Let’s make learning fun!

Hazlitt quote about learning

“Let’s make learning fun!” I always do a silent inner eye roll when I hear that phrase. The exclamation is loaded. Loaded with unspoken messages. The first message is that whatever we are currently doing with our pupils must be as dull as ditch water and needs jazzing up. We are urged to bring ‘magic’ […]

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Pronunciation and the development of vocabulary

teaching-reading-with-Phonic-Books-catch-up-readers

We all mispronounce words from time to time, especially when they are unfamiliar to us. Speech and Language Pathologist Miriam Fein explores the important link between pronunciation and the development of vocabulary. Every once in a while someone starts a thread on Twitter about words that they mispronounced for a long time because they only encountered […]

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Illiteracy linked to poor mental health

Kids hands on books

During mental health week, we think it is important to highlight the link between mental health and illiteracy. Illiteracy causes poor life outcomes, poor health, depression and poverty leading to crime. The Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Therapies at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has just reported on the global problem of poor […]

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What are decodable books?

Beginner reader using a decodable book

Although systematic, synthetic phonics teaching programmes are now a mandatory part of the UK National Curriculum for schools, one of the questions we are most frequently asked is still, ‘What are decodable books?’. Phonic Books co-founder, Tami Reis-Frankfort, provides a brief clarification of the meaning of the term, and explains why decodable books are so […]

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Supporting struggling readers in secondary school

Struggling readers in secondary school

Some years back I worked as a dyslexia specialist in a secondary school.  I often had to seek out my students who were attending other lessons.  The approach was they they couldn’t be withdrawn from their lessons as they had a right to access the curriculum.  Now, these were struggling readers and I always wondered […]

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Speech to Print – Print to Speech: what’s the difference?

Print to speech diagram

Have you heard of a phonics approach called ‘Speech to Print’?  Another name for it is ‘Linguistic Phonics’.  This approach is used in a number of programmes: Sounds Write, EBLI and Reading Simplified. The Speech to Print approach starts from the sounds in words (phonemes) and not the spellings (letters or spelling patterns).  It follows […]

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Why word-building is the number one lesson we should be teaching

Of all the strategies used for teaching reading, I believe that word-building is the most powerful. Why is that? Word-building incorporates two fundamental skills in learning to read: as children build a word, they learn to segment and blend. When we ask children to build a word, e.g., ‘map’ they need to segment the phonemes […]

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