Number Agents

 It has been quite a few years now since we started this journey, but one huge problem stands out with structured literacy...people simply see it as just a change in reading and decodable books have become far too important in terms of the teaching. With many simply swapping the ready to read books for decodable texts, but continuing to teach the same way, the same problems are coming up.  Children stuck on a stage for what seems forever, letter sounds not sticking, blending and segmenting not happening.   The problem is that the books are being used as the teaching tool, not simply one part of the process when they should actually just be a way of practising and putting into action the skills and knowledge being embedded.   The problem with structured literacy is that many don't actually understand the components of structured literacy.  They think it is just phonics. The layers of learning in many classrooms are still being forgotten and the reality ...

I have reflected before on the why of my scope and sequence.  But very basically the children in my class were the why, they showed me that before anything else, they needed a deep sense of pattern and number.  Just as my journey through structured literacy showed me that children needed that deep phonological and phonemic awareness. It has also been so lovely to hear from our new entrant class of 2022 that the scope and sequence is proving just as beneficial for them as it was for me last year. If you want to know more, there is an old blog post from last April that describes this in more detail. I started this process out of a want and real need to understand why children might struggle with maths and an interest in learning more about dyscalculia.  I avidly read everything I could and listened to podcasts whenever I went walking.  The work of Christopher Woodin really spoke to me and his patterns have since been a real game changer. When I wrote this scope and seq...