Number Agents

 Writing has been a massive area of growth for me this year.    Through structured literacy I had really altered my lens to writing.  For one, the penny had really dropped for in in regards to how hard the process of writing is.  Until I started my structured literacy journey I really had only scratched the surface on knowing just how many jigsaw parts had to go into being a writer. While I had really started to master the focus on the mechanics of it all and the explicit teaching of the code, I still had not really thought about how children come up with an idea, or considered just what a huge cognitive load this process is, when everything else is being focused on at the same time. With my focus on sentence level comprehension and fluency in reading, it was only logical that my next step was to do this in writing. This is where colourful semantics came in.  An oral language approach, it suited my needs down to the ground.  Allowing me to teach the sp...

My journey over the last few years has been about weaving all I know about play, playful/artful teaching and explicit instruction following the science of learning in literacy and maths.  I absolutely do not claim to be an expert and acknowledge that this is an ongoing (and I suspect always will be) journey for me.   One thing I have become very clear about is that it is not a this or that.  It is not play vs explicit teaching, it is not learning through the arts or learning in a structured way.  It is not about having high academic expectations vs wanting children to be happy. What is very clear is that this is about the science of learning, understanding how children learn, how the brain works, how children develop and building our approach to fit in with what research is showing us.  What I am also very clear about is that acceleration (hate that word) of learning is not possible without strong foundations and building those foundations is crucially impo...

 This post will be a little off the beaten track, but I had such a huge amount of fun in the last four weeks of term, that I just had to post about it.  It also has been an age since I have written about anything drama related that holds such a huge place in my teacher heart that I thought it deserved a place in my recent blog posts. Firstly, how in the heck does this relate to the Science of Reading?  Well if we look at the rope, we would see it relates heavily to the language comprehension side and then in the Active view of reading (which I prefer, again it features here.) My focus was largely on vocabulary development and background knowledge, but there were a heck of a lot of micro-skills going on as well when it comes to comprehension.   I have talked also before about the pillars of literacy.  This podcast with Lyn Stone is a great one to listen to, if you have not before. https://soundcloud.com/ollielovell/errr-066-lyn-stone-on-literacy-instruction-...

 Over the last two years I have become increasingly discontent with the way I have taught reading.  As many of you will know, we made the move to structured literacy about six years ago.  This has been massive for me, it meant a lot of change and a lot of learning, each year I have gotten better as I have learned more. Last year, I moved into a single cell classroom with Year 2 and 3 children, rather than my new entrant, year one mix.  This meant I wasn't able to do individual sessions and needed to group.  During the year I made tweaks and changes to these groups, as they became literacy groups, rather than reading groups, after all this isn't called structured reading.  But I had five groups, which meant I only really had time to see three a day if I was lucky.  Within even those five groups, the needs were quite diverse.  I also had tier two individual children that I was reading with at least twice a week, but preferably three  and was tr...

 I recently posted in my number agents group on facebook about the fact play, has made the effective teaching of literacy and numeracy possible.  I really like the work of Nell Duke and her take on rethinking the reading rope.  She features executive functions as playing a big role in developing effective readers, which is really missing from other models. Some people were keen to hear specifically how my day looks, so this post does that.  Obviously like every school, there are often variations to our timetable and we do have swimming, which I use as one of our play sessions. My approach to reading is then based on loads of learning that you can read about in my last post, but summed up here.  Fluency being the bridge to comprehension. But, back to the point of this post, what does my day look like and how do I merge two approaches, play and explicit teaching (two practices people see has being polar opposite) together. Each day, I write down the 'must do' item...

It has been a long time since I posted, but I seem to be posting a lot more of this type of info straight on my facebook page and in my group.  However, this post has been bubbling away all holidays and I just needed to get it down on paper so to speak.  Last year I wrote a blog post about structured literacy around the problems that I could see then with its implementation. After another year of immense learning I'd like to reflect on some of the things that I still consider to be a problem with structured literacy and its implementation.   So what remains the problem or opportunity with structured literacy? 1. I think the number one problem with the implementation of structured literacy remains the fact that structured literacy has come to mean for many people, just phonics.    Teacher development in many schools is yet to go beyond that and so approaches in classrooms continue to simply scratch the surface.  Structured literacy is not just phonics....