Number Agents

If you have been following my blogs, you'll know that most of the work I have been doing this year, spring boarded from the learning that is summarised on this post from January. There's still a problem with structured literacy Just one snippet of my literacy approach this year has been based around the class texts that I have been writing, with the inspiration of the children.  I have listened in to their conversations, eavesdropped into their play and been inspired. I've posted about these on my facebook page quite frequently.  Basically they are three part texts, featuring a cast of characters that children get to know, that have fun together.  I am reluctant to refer to them as decodable texts, because for some of my class they are 95% decodable, while for others, just 70%.   They read these texts, while sitting next to a buddy and with me there to help them with any sound spelling patterns they do not yet know. While the usual point of decodable readers is ...

 I sit down to write this blog post right in the middle of the holidays.  I have been weighing up the benefits of making this one post, or maybe taking each area and posting about each one separately.   While there are probably benefits to you, the poor person trying to wade through what I already know will be a mammoth post, my brain just needs to combine all of the things I have experimented with and worked on this term.   Not only that, I think a post like this shows clearly how many aspects there may be to what  I like to call Science Informed Literacy (hopefully that is not a phrase that has been coined so far.).  When I say Science Informed Literacy I do so for two reasons, one being that Structured literacy is a term 'owned' by the IDA and the term 'Science of Reading' implies to me that this is all about reading.  If I am to be honest, I am also really sick and tired hearing the terms being used incorrectly. Hence, the term Science In...

 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-...