This post is possibly going to come across as a little blunt, for that, I offer no apology. By now, we should know better and we should be doing better! Like many of you, I rejoiced when we got rid of national standards, but every day it becomes more obvious that this government is leading us back there, this time under the guise of science. Don't get me wrong, if you are a follower of my blog, you will know that I support an explicit and systematic approach to the teaching of literacy and numeracy. However, my support comes with a warning label. This warning label clearly states that we should not blindly follow one way of working or one 'science' while ignoring what we know (or should know by now) about children. So what is it our children need most? What our children need most right now is safety. In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say that without safety, anything else you do is a waste of time. If we want learning to be an outcome of what we are doing, we ne...
I am passionate about play and structured explicit learning, finding the best of both worlds.