Number Agents

If you follow my blog or Facebook page, you will know that in 2023 I moved away from grouping my children for reading and started using whole class texts. The Rationale Behind Whole Class Texts These whole class texts were born out of my learning around the role of repeated reading, the importance of fluency, and sentence-level comprehension. Our Reading Routine Over the last three years, these texts—while they have changed in content—have followed a set routine. Each day, we read, a new part is added, while the part we have already read is retained. Once there are three parts to the text, a new one is begun, keeping the last part read and making it the beginning. I have written before about our reading routine with these texts, so I won't go into this again in great detail, only to say we use echo reading, choral reading, fill-the-gap reading, partner reading, and independent reading. We explore unknown vocabulary and decode new words together before reading. The Characters and Se...

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally linking Reading and Writing Why a Basic Organiser Struck a Chord Recently, I shared a very basic organiser for reading comprehension on my Facebook page—something I have used frequently in my classroom. I was genuinely surprised by how popular the post became. It’s clear there’s a real hunger among teachers for practical ways to foster writing independence in young learners. With that in mind, I wanted to share the reasoning behind this organiser and how it fits into the wider journey of developing independent writers. Laying the Foundations: Sentence-Level Understanding My class of six- and seven-year-olds are building solid foundations as writers. We’ve invested a lot of time working at the sentence level, using Colourful Semantics to help children understand how sentences are constructed. From there, we began to add greater detail using planners inspired by Colourful Semantics, linking this with th...