Number Agents

 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....

 For those that have been following my journey, you will know that it started with play and a massive passion for drama (mantle of the expert in particular.) Number Agents was born out of this, a brilliantly effective way to bring maths to life in an imagined, but very authentic world.   My book Number Agents if available through my TPT store and it explains all the ins and outs and whys of this world.   Last year (as you will know if you have been following this journey) I encountered a class where more than half had entered school with significant developmental needs that I needed to meet, they also had challenges when it came to number, particularly around numerosity...deep understanding of quantity. There are quite a few posts on here about my scope and sequence, so I won't bore you here.  However I was primed to make a change for my children because structured literacy had been part of my journey for a few years at this point. While I loved teaching th...

 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 ...