Recommended books for Literacy

Whole School Literacy

Megan Dixon and I are attempting to create a Literacy Leader group. Here is the list of interested people so far…
mainstreamsen.wordpress.com/20…
And this is the first blog by Megan. 
Books – A Journey 
by Megan Dixon (@DamsonEd) Director of Literacy for The Aspire Educational Trust
I like reading. I like books that make me think. I like books that challenge me to think in different ways. I don’t always agree with them, or like what they say. I don’t always enjoy the process of reading them. But I like the way they help me to understand from a different viewpoint. Below are some books that I return to again and again.
I would be very grateful for any other suggestions!
Oakhill, Cain and Elbro (2015) Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension. Routledge
This is great! Clarke et al (2012) Developing Reading Comprehension, Wiley, is good too.

Goswami (2014) Child Psychology; A very short Introduction. Oxford. Small enough to slip into a pocket. Fascinating

Blakemore and Frith (2005) The Learning Brain, Lessons for Education. Blackwell. I found this to be very clearly explained and often use extracts for it for training.

Paley (1991) The Boy who would be a helicopter. Uses of Story Telling in the Classroom. This is a really thought-provoking read, especially if you work with younger children. A technique for developing story telling/drama called Helicopter Stories was developed by MakeBelieveArts from the writings of Paley. It has been very successful at our school, providing a forum for oral story-telling and developing communication skills.

Haven (2000) Story Proof – The science behind startling power of story. Why we all need stories in our lives.

Gross (2013) Time to Talk, Routledge. Essential reading (in my opinion). Especially if you are interested in teaching literacy/reading/writing . “Written by the government’s former Communication Champion for children, it showcases and celebrates effective approaches in schools and settings across the country. Jean Gross helpfully summarises research on what helps children and young people develop good language and communication skills, and highlights the importance of key factors: a place to talk, a reason to talk and support for talk.”

Thank you Megan for these recommendations – what a great list.

I might add Wolf, (2008) Proust and the Squid, Icon Books. An interesting read on “The Story and Science of the Reading Brain’.

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AUTHOR PROFILE
Me

ME

Literacy and Language Co-ordinator. Formerly an English and Drama teacher. Own views.
english

94 stories

COMMENTS
 Stephen Lockyer

Stephen Lockyer

@mrlockyer

2 years ago

Both Story Proof and the helicopter story book look really interesting! Great to see such a different range of interesting books for Education – thank you!

Recommend 

 Stephanie Keenan

Stephanie Keenan

@mskeenan

2 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Keen on work of Gross. Will check out those I haven’t read 🙂

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

Yes a great list from Megan isn’t it? I agree too about the different range – the little Goswami book was my half term reading and was interesting.

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

Some new ones for me too Stephanie

Recommend 

 Deborah Banks

Deborah Banks

@dba

2 years ago

Good titles …some to get! I really like Geoff Barton’s Don’t Call It Literacy…last year we had it as a whole school ‘class reader’ for staff and structured T&L meetings around it. Also love Daniel Willingham’s Why Students Don’t Like School which looks at how the brain works and how curricula often are structured counter productively. Finally, my fav read is Isabel L Beck’s Bringing Words to Life about how to teach vocabulary beyond just subject specifics.

Recommend 

 Stephen Lockyer

Stephen Lockyer

@mrlockyer

2 years ago

So I found a link to the first 20 pages of Story Proof (legally!) here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uspfMRlGXVoC&pg=PR5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

@dba great – I will add onto blog this eve – thanks and to you @mrlockyer for link #hooter

Recommend 

 Abigail Mann

Abigail Mann

@abster

2 years ago

Ooh these are great! Thank you to Megan for sharing. I have a few books to buy now. I also have Why Students Don’t Like School and am working my way through it slowly.

Recommend 

 Sinead Gaffney

Sinead Gaffney

@shinpad1

2 years ago

I read ‘Literacy and popular culture’ by Jackie Marsh in 2002, the first academic book I read as a practising teacher. It started me off on a whole new way of thinking about literacy and seeing the school experience from the chd’s perspective. (She’s my supervisor now!). My Y1/2 classroom had been quite formal until then. I tried a Spider-Man theme for a half-term and boom! children wanted to write. My tough-guy boys were climbing over each other to get into the reading corner/writing table. I’d recommend it. Her more recent work on including digital literacy experiences in the classroom is also well worth a look. I really like this list and will return to it!

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

#hooter @abigailmann

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

@sineadgaffney firstly realised you’re not ony list – will rectify. And I will add that to blog – wonderful story and love that she’s your supervisor now- thanks

Recommend 

 Sinead Gaffney

Sinead Gaffney

@shinpad1

2 years ago

Also this recent padlet by @marygtroche is worth its weight in gold. Such a wealth of reading experience and thinking in it. http://padlet.com/marygtroche/usefulresources

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

Great – I think we may need a 2nd blog – might be over 500 word limit – will do tonight – great response – thanks to everyone especially to Megan for getting us started

Recommend 

 Megan Dixon

Megan Dixon

@damsoned

2 years ago

Thanks Jules! I’m off to buy a book or two!

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

Me too @damsoned – think will do a second blog with others Part 2 🙂

Recommend 

 Jenna Lucas

Jenna Lucas

@jenna

2 years ago

Thanks for the recommendations! I have an ever growing ‘book’ wish list! I’ve just started @learningspy’s The Secret of Literacy.

Recommend 

 Me

Jules Daulby

@jules

2 years ago

Ah yes – we should add to list – another one I need to read …

2 years ago

Inspiring reading list – they’re going on my summer reading list! Thanks

2 years ago

Fantatsic list here and have added a few to my school’s CPD library.

Building a Buzz – developing communities of readers

Megan Dixon is Director of Literacy for the Aspire Educational Trust, a small, friendly MAT in Cheshire, also Head of Research and Development for Aspirer Teaching Alliance, Cheshire. Trained IoE, London. Taught in London and Cheshire all the way through from Rec to Y6. Master of Teaching, IoE/UCL, Master of Literacy Learning and Literacy Difficulties, IoE/UCL. Was a Nat Strat Consultant for a year.

Now, she teaches children and teachers. Love research!

One of the questions I am often asked starts with “do you know a book that is good for ……?” And while I am very happy to talk books with anyone, anytime, it does worry me that sometimes teachers don’t seem to have much knowledge of the wonderful range of children’s literature that is around. In fact a few years ago this very issue was described by Teresa Cremin and colleagues; you can read the executive summary here; https://ukla.org/downloads/teachers_as_readers.pdf

Combined with the fact that I strongly believe that we must work hard at developing vibrant reading cultures in school and that you can’t teach reading effectively unless you have read the book you are using (and you’d be surprised at the number of teachers I meet who have only read the Teachers Guide), I am constantly looking for ways of sneaking a bit of gratuitous book sharing into the school day.

So, last term, at one of our Lit Co meetings, one of our schools mentioned that they were going to be involved with a children’s book competition. An independent bookshop, who we often work with, had arranged a Picture Book of the Year award and their school was involved in the judging. The school would be supplied with 10 books to read and each child would vote for their favourite. She wondered if we would all like to do it. Brilliant! A plan was hatched.

So, for two weeks each school in our trust read the 10 books. Every day, each class shared a different story, as they rotated around the classes. It took about 15-20 minutes each day to read the stories and talk about them. Each teacher found a different time of day to share the texts, but often it worked best if the children could hear the story in the morning, so they could think about it and share their ideas during the day. Every school had a large display where children could share their thoughts and reviews of the books. The buzz around the schools was fantastic. Many teachers found that the children began requesting their favourites at other times of the day. Children were heard debating the merits of each book in the playground. Parents were invited to share the books with children at regular morning Book and Bacon Butty sessions or afternoon Relaxing Read storytelling groups. At the end of the two weeks, everyone voted for their favourite title: Reception stood by their favourite book, Year 1 and 2 ticked on voting slips, others classes voted online or recorded their votes in graphs and charts.

It was such a resounding success we are going to do it again. Of course, we have realised we don’t need to have a book competition to be part of; we can just do it ourselves. I have calculated that for just over £3000, across our 7 schools, we can have a “Book Award” each term. We have decided that we will set up blogs so the children can write reviews and respond to each other across the schools. Each school will have its own display and we will start collating all the children’s fantastic, original responses to the texts in our own Book Guide. Older children can read to younger children, parents and mystery readers will be asked to share the stories. Parents will be encouraged to get involved. I am even thinking of organising an inter-schools debate. At the end of the two weeks, we will vote for our favourite and then write to the author to tell them.

It seems to me that this does much more than just be part of a competition. It provides a real purpose and energy for engaging with books, helping to establish regular reading for pleasure opportunities. It encourages the children to become critics and to share and record their thoughts. It builds a breadth and depth of experience of literature, allowing us to introduce children to texts they might not experience themselves. And as a final bonus, we will be collecting sets of books that can be used to teach reading, and every teacher will have read them. Win, win!

Image – Matilda by Dahl – illustrator Quentin Blake 

What Does A Specialist Reading Teacher Do With A Book?

  
Pat Stone has worked with small children for 30 years, first as a play leader and then as a primary school teacher.

She has been a specialist reading teacher since 2007. Pat trained in Reading Recovery (RR) and now teaches ‘catch up’ reading but not in a school that is signed up to RR at the moment.

I have been interested for a very long time, in how children learn.  

I taught my children to read before I trained as a teacher – what we did instinctively was very similar to RR. 

I used to help my friend to learn reading and writing, when we were both 5.

I wrote this piece in response to people who think I teach children to guess, I get children to spend hours memorising ‘sight’ words, I read a book to them first so that they can memorise it, I don’t teach phonics…

Using Tiger, Tiger by Beverley Randell Pat describes in detail how she teaches reading.

Click here for full post 

Handwriting with Dr Webb – part 2 ‘When it gets tricky’

Megan Dixon is Director of Literacy for the Aspire Educational Trust, a small, friendly MAT in Cheshire, also Head of Research and Development for Aspirer Teaching Alliance, Cheshire. Trained IoE, London. Taught in London and Cheshire all the way through from Rec to Y6. Master of Teaching, IoE/UCL, Master of Literacy Learning and Literacy Difficulties, IoE/UCL. Was a Nat Strat Consultant for a year.

Now, she teaches children and teachers. Love research!
Thoughts from a day with Dr Angela Webb – Chair of the National Handwriting Association.

This post continues the thoughts and messages gleaned from the day spent with Dr Angela Webb, when she visited our Teaching School Alliance.

Part 2 – When it gets tricky…

Automaticity of handwriting helps you write without thinking and so sustaining writing over time is important. Speed is important, and needs to be developed. If a child can’t get enough writing down, their writing can lack ideas, and context. The quantity of writing correlates to compositional quality at age 11years and 16 years and so, of course speed is important (Christiansen, 2005).

In addition, writing quality affects the perceptions of readers (Graham, 2011), meaning legibility is important. By the end of KS1, for most children the nuts and bolts of handwriting should be secure. They should be able to produce a legible, joined script with comfort, ease and fluency. The focus of teaching in KS2 becomes speed, and flexibility. Children should be encouraged to understand and use their handwriting in different ways ; careful and neat for presentation, in comparison to faster yet legible for recording ideas at speed. By KS3 the focus should be writing sustainably for longer stretches of time. By the end primary school, children choose their own handwriting style and it becomes a part of their personality. ​

Cursive or not….

Cursive just means running or flowing. It relates to flowing writing when the pen doesn’t leave the page. Part cursive is a very successful form of handwriting and there are many places where there are acceptable breaks through a word (this is included in the National Curriculum – Year3/4). 50% of adults write part cursively; 25% adults write full cursively; 25% print. Handwriting is personal – writing neatly and quickly in a fully cursive leading from the line can be difficult to sustain at speed. In addition, teaching fully cursive starting each letter from the line means that children have to relearn lsome letter forms when they come to join (imagine joining o and o when you have learnt that each o has to start at the line…)

Teaching Handwriting

Handwriting is a whole body activity including fine motor, posture and balance and core stability. Practice is REALLY important; distribution of practice is important. Regular short sessions are much more effective that one long session every week.

You have to teach the movements for each letter. Developmentally, first children learn to control vertical movements and then clockwise, circular movements. However, the letter movements for some letters include anti-clockwise movements and this may not be well developed. You can’t make a cake without the ingredients; you need the perceptual, speech and language, and motor movements established.

KS1 Lazy Eight – A typically developing 6 year old can do it without any trouble. You need to be able to this, before you can write cursively. Always start with curve to the left at the top.
KS2 Draw a circle -give it curly hair, all around the circle and then inside the circle. Use this as a warm up exercise (we made this into a Christmas Bauble for decorations!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching – the 4 Ps of Process

1. Posture – sit up, feet on the floor, bottom at back of seat, but away from back of chair, right angles

2. Pen grasp /pencil grip – if possible encourage children to adopt a conventional dynamic tripod grip (I call this froggy fingers). Pad of thumb and pad of forefinger in a pincer grip, middle finger tucked underneath as support. Only the first 3 fingers should move. Put most pencil grips in the bin – most don’t help. If the children must have a pencil grip, use one that use a pencil grip that stops the thumb crossing over the front of the grip. Alternatively, give the child a VERY SMALL PENCIL to write with – it is very hard to control with anything other than a tripod grip (our Year 1 teachers has sharpened all her pencils to 1-2cm length and it works brilliantly!). However there is no evidence that changing a pencil grip improves handwriting quality (Zivani and Elkins, 1984) so only change the grip to reduce strain in the wrist and shoulders that will affect speed and sustainability.

3. Paper position – rotate writing at 90 degrees . Be careful for left-handers

4. Pressure – using retractable pencils can help children learn to control the pressure, as the lead will break if they press too hard.

 

 

 

The Handwriting Product – 7 ‘s’

Shape , Size, Spacing, Sitting on the line, Slant, Speed, Style

Date

shape

size

space

Sitting on line

slant

speed

style

other

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Year 5 is a great opportunity to have a blitz on handwriting (we are about to start a Year2, Year5 and Year 7 Boot Camp!). You can use a version of the grid above with children to analyse their strengths and weaknesses in handwriting and to evaluate their progress. Once the different aspects for development are identified, then teaching can be more specific and targeted.

The DASH handwriting test (Pearson) can provide a standardised assessment of handwriting ability and help to identify children with specific special needs. It assesses handwriting across 5 separate tasks.

In conclusion…

This day (amongst others) highlighted to me the importance of getting the basics secure for children as they begin to learn how to read and write. It seems to be that talking, listening, comprehending, inferring, problem solving, looking, noticing, self-regulating and the physical control (both gross and fine motor) are all fundamental essentials and we neglect them at our peril.

And finally, if you want to know more about handwriting…. Join the National Handwriting Association.

References

Christiansen, C (2005) The Critical Role Handwriting Plays in the Ability to Produce High Quality Written Text , http://www.schools.utah.gov/CURR/langartelem/Core/Handwriting/CriticalRole.aspx

DASH- Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting – http://www.pearsonclinical.co.uk/AlliedHealth/PaediatricAssessments/PerceptualFineMotorDevelopment/DetailedAssessmentofSpeedofHandwriting(DASH)/DetailedAssessmentofSpeedofHandwriting(DASH).aspx

Zivani, J. and Elkins,J. ( 1984) An Evaluation of Handwriting Performance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248971065_An_Evaluation_of_Handwriting_Performance

 

Handwriting with Dr Angela Webb

Megan Dixon is Director of Literacy for the Aspire Educational Trust, a small, friendly MAT in Cheshire, also Head of Research and Development for Aspirer Teaching Alliance, Cheshire. Trained IoE, London. Taught in London and Cheshire all the way through from Rec to Y6. Master of Teaching, IoE/UCL, Master of Literacy Learning and Literacy Difficulties, IoE/UCL. Was a Nat Strat Consultant for a year.
Now, she teaches children and teachers. Love research!
Thoughts from a day with Dr Angela Webb – Chair of the National Handwriting AssociationPart 1.

Last week, our Teaching Alliance welcomed Angela to spend a day busting some myths about the teaching of handwriting. In this first post on the subject, I have tried to highlight some of the key messages I took from the day.

Why bother with handwriting?

Handwriting is the Cinderella of literacy; the research pool is small, but growing and recently there has been an explosion in interest. Handwriting is not a dying art; it supports and enhances cognitive development of children. Furthermore, children spend about 60% of each day in pen and pencil activities. Handwriting is the medium through which we test children and judge their ability (Santangelo and Graham, 2015, Graham et al, 2011). Children care about handwriting. This means we should care too. 

Writing by hand impacts on cognitive learning in all domains, in particular, embodied cognition. How we interact with the world in a physical sense impacts on our understanding and learning.

What we should know as teachers

In general, statistics seem to show that developmentally girls learn faster and control handwriting more quickly than boys. In schools, it seems that handwriting is seen as important in KS1, but not in KS2, but how the skill is perceived in school is important. The question is whether handwriting is considered an art form or a functional skill. It is great if the books look lovely, but we need to see handwriting as a functional skill.

The functions of handwriting are;

1. The obvious ones; Putting thoughts on paper, recording events, communicating ideas, demonstrating knowledge, supporting memory

2. Less obvious: Handwriting becomes a personal expression of yourself, it can relieve stress, and can promotes the flow of narrative, strengthening cognitive learning. The act of handwriting enables you to process ideas and understand them. For a successful writer, the thinking process and writing process are continuous. For those who are not successful, writing becomes a stop start process.

Karen James (2014) and Berninger et al, (1994) highlight the role handwriting plays in early reading development. When children have to conceptualise the letter forms, handwriting supports this learning. In addition andwriting support spelling; ALL FORMS of handwriting support spelling (not just joined or joined writing leading in from the line). The quantity of writing correlates to compositional quality at age 11years and 16years, therefore speed is important(Christiansen, 2005). This means it is important to have a continued focus on teaching handwriting all the way through the primary school.

 

In KS1, the focus of teaching should be on legibility, comfort and ease and fluency (joining letters with movement flow, spatial control and temporal flow). Teaching a dynamic cursive style (joining links, but not leading up from the line) is most effective.

In KS2 the focus alters towards be speed, (the nuts and bolts of letter formation should be under control) and legibility. This should be combined with a flexibility to write in different ways for different purposes (fast for narrative/story writing; slow for presentation)

Because handwriting is so complex, it has to be taught.​

Practice is REALLY important and the distribution and variablity of practice need considering. Once the letter formation is under control, it is better to practice whole alphabet every day, rather than individual letters.

In the EYFS, there should be a motor control development/handwriting activity everyday

In KS1 there should be 15 minutes of monitored practice every day. You have to watch them.

In KS2, 15 minutes 2/3 times a week , with a focus on speed and legibility, is enough.

More to follow, but until then, the National Handwriting Association is a treasure trove of information about developing handwriting. http://www.nha-handwriting.org.uk/

Or… dig out that old National Strategies book – Developing Early Writing, Part 3, Section 3 – according to Angela, its gold dust!

 

References

Berninger, V.W. and Swanson, H.L. (1994) Modifying Hayes and Flower’s model of skilled writing to explain beginning and developing writing. In E.C. Butterfield (ed.) Children’s Writing: Toward a Process Theory of the Development of Skilled Writing (pp. 57–81). Hampton Hill: JAI Press.

Christiansen, C (2005) The Critical Role Handwriting Plays in the Ability to Produce High Quality Written Text , http://www.schools.utah.gov/CURR/langartelem/Core/Handwriting/CriticalRole.aspx

James, K (2012) The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211949312000038
Santangelo and Graham, 2015 A comprehension meta-analysis of handwriting instruction, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-015-9335-1#/page-1
 

 

Top Tips for Small Group Work

  
Nancy Gedge is a primary school teacher. She is also ‘TES blogger of the year’ and writes about inclusion and SEND.

I spend a lot of time working with small groups so, for what it’s worth, here are my top tips for getting the most out of the time you spend with each other.

1. Working with a smaller group can give you a more intimate and less formal feeling, but never forget that you are the teacher, and you need to expect exactly the same standards from the children, in terms of behaviour, both towards you and towards each other, and work, as you would if you were standing in front of a whole class.

2. Think about the environment you are working in with the children. Can you do anything to make them feel as if it is their space? Think about displaying their work, giving them opportunities to do work that can be displayed.

3. Think about the relationships at work between the children. If they have SEND and are in the upper reaches of the junior years it is likely that they have been working with each other for some time – and there is no guarantee that they will actually like each other. Spend some time working on relationships with them – no one can get anything useful done if they are in a state of high emotional drama.

4. If you are working with children who are struggling with reading and/or writing, it is likely that they will be reading/writing simple texts that they can access and achieve success. There are plenty of good ones around that lend themselves to asking those ‘I wonder what…?’ questions – make sure that you invest them with excitement and enthusiasm.

5. If you are asking children to read aloud, be sensitive. This can be a real problem for children who have struggled for a long time with reading. One way to handle this is to ask the children to read to themselves or to a partner (you can work with just one of them) and ask questions ‘just to check they have read it’ after.

 

So that’s it. It’s not so different to working with a class – except that you are able to check up more easily that everyone is doing what they should be doing in the short time they are with you – as opposed to staring out of the window daydreaming, or them getting up to all the other displacement activities that children who really don’t want to do what you want them to do are wont to do.
Featured image courtesy of jeandrawingaday 

Spelling Strategies (not really evidence based to be honest)

Jules Daulby is a Language and Literacy Co-ordinator for an Upper School Comprehensive.  She leads an attached Speech and Language Base, is responsible for whole school literacy and manages an alternative curriculum for students who study an ASDAN qualification.

Firstly, if it’s an individual, check what you need to focus on.

It’s worth pulling out about ten spelling mistakes in a piece of writing and looking for a pattern.

Are they using phonic knowledge?

Synthetic phonics: breaking down the word into its smallest parts help students. Ch/air or c/a/t. This is my first rule of spelling.

Analytic phonics is also useful. Onset and rime c/at or sh/op, and word families – ai – pair, fair, lair etc is useful to see words via analogy and rhyme.

I still use magnetic letters with my weakest spellers in year 11.  Using ‘ee’ as an example – start with keep, then take off the k and replace with sw take off the p and replace with t – take off the sw and replace with f (always saying sounds and the word at the same time). This works wonders for some and you can then get them to create more words with ‘ee’ and write them in their books. We might then talk about meanings of words and write some in sentences. Do this with all the 44 phonemes.

Do they use phonics too much?

Bruthur or bruvah? If so, students may need to memorise and practise. Apps such as Spellboard and Spellosaurus are useful as they scaffold spelling – students can also record themselves saying the word in a sentence and with Spellboard even have a picture to match. See clip of Katy using Spellosaurus

Are they missing out vowels?

Lbry for library? Then ensure they know that each word must have a vowel in it (include y for my etc) – worth going over long and short vowels with them – high probability it’ll be either or…here’s a post I wrote on this. Magic e/split digraph; whatever you want to call it helps all students in my experience.

Have they used enough or too many syllables?

Catrophe – signs of mispronunciation – say word out loud, chunk word into syllables and use alongside saying the syllables ca/tas/tro/phe
(Also link to phonic letter sounds).

Do they use root words for prefixes ?

Are they making links?
Always spelled allways or already spelled allready? A simple explanation to show them the root words ‘way’, ‘ready’ and ‘all’ and then prefix ‘al’ which only ever has one ‘l’ should suffice. I write about this here.

Are they mixing up letters?

Tarin/trian for train – one of the trickiest to remediate as it’s likely to be a visual perceptual difficulty. Students need to be aware they do this and self-check – having a scratch pad with them can help – they can try out spellings to see if they look right before writing in their exercise book. Phonics will also help; if they reread by sounding out it should be clear to them what they’ve done.

Mmenomics can help some students – I still say big elephants are ugly for beautiful. Also, Never Eat Shredded Wheat for the compass and another phrase, stalactites come down (like tights)!

Say it how it’s spelled – feb/BRU/ary – hyper/bowl for hyperbole not ‘burlee’.

Spelling sayings such ‘as i before e except after c’ are unpopular with purists as there are exceptions. I have to admit to using this myself with words such as ‘receive’ however even though words like ‘their’ don’t follow the rule – it’s up to the student and at what stage and age they are with spellings.

If you teach secondary or older primary students, do check they know the phonic letter sounds and the 44 phonemes as a minimum requirement. If they still get mixed up there are many hundreds of alternatives which may or may not help. I’d say it depends on the level of their spelling difficulty. I still think memorising irregular words is required – many of my students get mixed up with were and where and I just don’t want them too so we go over it a lot.

Homophones are helpful to point out – hear, here and heteronyms reading and Reading, bow and bow.

I like to ensure my students can at least spell the first 200 high frequency words and a useful addition to my spelling strategies would be a tough typing course called Englishtype . This not only teaches students to touch type but does it via spellings, including using high frequency words  – a win win in my opinion and I’m buying ten licenses this term.

Other programmes I know of are Lexia and Word Shark which you may want to look at; I don’t use them at the moment but I have seen them used successfully.

Students becoming word detectives, analysing words, making analogies, seeing variations and learning the meaning can all help them to reflect upon and manipulate the sound structure of words and this essentially is what good spellers do naturally (they may also have better visual memories).

I hope this helps; it is very much my practice based on experience and strategies which have helped both me and my students.
Good luck.

Handwriting – helping pupils to have a clear voice.

Lisa Harford is a primary teacher who gets enthused about speaking, listening, reading and writing on a daily basis.

Have you ever done that thing where you sort of fall in love with your signature? I am hoping when I admit that as a teenager, I spent quite a lot of time perfecting what I considered to be a suitably dramatic signature, with a flourish and an underscoring line and a most emphatic ‘dot’ after it, that I am not quite as unique as I possibly sound! In hindsight, I am pretty sure that my preoccupation with perfecting my signature stemmed from my desire to make a mark in this world, both literally and figuratively. In those teenage years when you question everything, in particular who you are and what place you hold in the world, my signature seemed a pretty important thing to get right.

Writing has always formed an important part of my life. I have kept diaries, scribbled down stories, written terrible but heartfelt poetry and been inspired by and in awe of the writing of others. My writing has improved and refined itself over my lifetime both in my ability to compose and in my ability to scribe. The visual character of my writing has changed too – what would be described as my handwriting style. Amazingly, this change did not occur through a complex transformative process over a number of years. My handwriting changed from one English lesson to the next, due to the feedback I received in one lesson from one teacher, who basically, in the nicest possible way told me that if I ever handed in work with the same handwriting style again she would not mark it. Pretty harsh huh? Especially as I bet you’re thinking it was because it wasn’t neat enough? Well you would be wrong. I was a conscientious pupil and my handwriting was no exception. The work I handed in was neat and well-presented. So what was her problem with it?

I wish I had a piece of my writing from back then to illustrate what my writing was like. A brief description will hopefully give you some idea. My writing was small and cramped with little or no definition between ascenders and descenders and it sloped backwards towards the left at a quite alarming angle! It had letters which started and finished in the wrong places and which sometimes I chose to join and sometimes not. It did have religiously defined spaces between each of the words so it looked wonderfully neat. ‘Immaculate presentation’ was the feedback I most usually received until that English lesson when my teacher informed me that my handwriting had to change.

This teacher had quite rightly assessed my handwriting as being counter-productive to what writing is supposed to do. She identified the deficiencies in size, joins, fluency and orientation and explained how they were actually inhibiting the process of writing for me, slowing me down, making me preoccupied with the mechanics of my writing instead of understanding that it was a powerful tool to help me crystallise ideas and communicate them effectively. Her feedback had a profound effect partly because no-one had ever talked to me about my writing in that way before and partly because I was mortified! But her words wrought a complete change in my handwriting and it happened immediately. I implemented all the changes she suggested and although it took real effort to undo eight years of handwriting habits, that is virtually what happened in the space of 48 hours. Her advice and critical feedback made me look at my writing in a new way. Yes, I still saw it as an individual expression of my own style and character but I also began to see handwriting as a weapon in my armoury of skills to help me optimise my ideas and knowledge and communicate them effectively to others.

So by now, you will have guessed that I am a passionate advocate of the importance of handwriting for pupils and why comments that it is just the ‘icing on the delicious cake of composition’ feel wrong to me. The view of handwriting as an ‘add on’, a ‘some kids get it, some don’t’ fails to make the connection between the internal voice of the pupil and the external written voice which gives it power. The idea that in a digital age, pupils don’t really need such a skill is just a lie. Handwriting, taught well is so much more than just presentation and neatness. It gives pupils the confidence to write quickly, concentrating on the amazing ideas they have for composition and leaving behind the dull but necessary focus on the mechanics of letter formation.

To develop good handwriting it needs to be done little and often and with passion! It needs to be expected in every classroom, by every teacher! In my, ‘if I ran a school’ moments, I wonder what this sort of declaration of intent would look like? People have talked about teaching handwriting and equated it with the nineteenth century, conjuring visions of clerks writing with impeccable quality but no real import. I understand this frustration in response to the criteria for judging writing at KS2 and the validity of saying composition should hold sway. I understand that handwriting will probably always be the ‘Cinderella’ on the writing stage and that in reality, despite the renewed focus of the KS2 writing test, it will languish in many a classroom for lack of time in an already crowded teaching day. And yet we should acknowledge that handwriting skills go far beyond the horizons of a mere test.

You will not be surprised to hear that in my own classroom, handwriting always has a high profile and a daily workout. The power of individual transformative narratives although important, are not sufficient justification for implementing classroom practices in my opinion, so I have to say that my decision to do handwriting every day came mostly from an article I read several years ago in Nursery World. It was given to me by a colleague and in it, a Dutch study found that 33% of 7 year olds could not make simple shapes like circles, triangles and crosses with accuracy. They could not hold a pencil properly. They had restricted flexibility in wrists and fingers to cope adequately with changes of direction. In short, they were poor writers. Reading the article crystallised some of my own misgivings about the way I was teaching children in my class to write. It was the impetus I needed to set myself the task of re-thinking the writing process and of producing a small scale research project and teaching programme with my children. I set about making sure they had the opportunity to address the shortcomings identified in the article. We played games to improve flexibility and eye-hand co-ordination. We trained children to look out for and correct pencil grips for their classmates. We peer-assessed the marks they made and praised consistency and effort. We did not start formal letter formation but concentrated instead on making those simple shapes with accuracy and quality. We did it every day for 15 minutes, gradually increasing the range of shapes and then slowly introducing letters in groups which required the same number of changes in direction. The photos at the bottom of this post give a flavour of the programme I implemented and despite what you’re probably thinking, it was fun. The children loved the routine, they responded well to the increased expectations and more importantly I saw real improvement in the way they approached making marks and later, in the development of their letter formation. I did this with my EY class but in subsequent years and with different age groups I have continued to use and adapt this approach. It will be of no surprise to anyone who sees children’s writing on a regular basis that there are still large numbers of older KS2 children who begin and end letters in the wrong place, do not join correctly and who cannot write quickly and legibly under time pressure.

I think this post is both a call for handwriting to be given the credit and profile it deserves and a plea for it to be accorded the significant skill status it merits. Learning to write well is tricky and requires concentration and dexterity. When we say to our pupils that handwriting is not as important as the ideas their writing contains, of course that is true. No one would seriously argue against it but we must also make sure that they do not take home the message that handwriting is not really important. Children need to understand that to make your own mark in this world you need to be able to ‘make marks’ which convey the rules, conventions and structures of our language. You need to be able to make those marks clearly, legibly, quickly and confidently. You need to be able to make your writing obey the fantastic ideas you have in your head as quickly and as accurately as your wonderful imagination can think of them. The world has limited patience for anything not immediately transparent to it. It sometimes treats unfairly that which it cannot immediately understand. Children should know that the world will not make the effort to mediate their writing forever. Handwriting is the means by which the clear, confident and imaginative voice can speak to the world.

Photographs showing early attempts at making simple shapes with accuracy and quality.

Groups of letters defined by the number of changes of direction children must make to form them correctly.

Photographs showing early attempts at making simple shapes with accuracy and quality.

Give Me a Hand

 Sue Cowley is a writer, teacher and parent. She provides training for teachers internationally, and she helps to run her local preschool. Her website is http://www.suecowley.co.uk.

 Give Me a Hand

Handwriting allows for literacy, but it is not the same thing as literacy – it is just a medium for words. With the invention of first the typewriter, and then the computer, it is now perfectly possible to live a literate life without ever handwriting at all. This is not to say that children shouldn’t learn to handwrite, at the very least because humans have always made marks and making those marks communicates meaning. (Perhaps there is a link between the physical act of writing, and the way that we think as we do it?) But many adults get by these days barely ever handwriting a word and the days of Monks inscribing beautiful calligraphy are long gone.

The new Key Stage 2 English standards conflate handwriting with writing: if a child cannot write legibly, in a joined up script, she or he cannot exceed the expected level in writing. In classrooms, perfecting the skill of handwriting is bound up together with learning to write, so you can see how the government might have got them mixed up. But once they can write, children use handwriting across the curriculum – they also write numbers and symbols, as well as letters. When they write in English, this is about the expression of ideas, rather than about the physical act of writing them. Handwriting is a mechanism for communicating meaning, rather than part of the subject in its own right. And developing the ability to handwrite begins much earlier on, long before a child learns the intellectual parts of reading and writing. Handwriting is probably more closely linked to physical education than to any other part of the curriculum.

A child cannot write, and certainly cannot join letters neatly, unless she or he has good motor control. Children’s motor control develops from the head downwards, and from the body outwards – a baby must learn to support her head before she can sit up, and control her arms before she can manipulate small items with her fingers. Some children find motor control more difficult than others, perhaps because of a muscular or coordination problem. It is typically harder for children who are left handed to write with a neat script, because they have to push the pen across the paper, rather than pull it. The new requirement will work against these children. To reach the point where they can achieve neat, fluent and joined-up handwriting, as well as knowing how to form words out of sounds, children also need good physical development in a number of areas:

✓ Fine motor control;

✓ Gross motor control;

✓ Body posture;

✓ Eye to hand co-ordination;

✓ Focus, concentration and persistence.

 In early years settings, there is a lot of focus on fine and gross motor control – the children are busy using their hands for many things other than writing. Later on, it is more about getting the letter formation into their physical memories. I’ve always felt that we could do more fine motor building activities in the later primary years – there is less time for the kind of school crafts that used to do this job. (Although I wasn’t keen on the hours of sewing we did, it improved my fine motor control.) In my experience, children’s handwriting can get worse, rather than better, as they get older. Perhaps this is because they are asked to write more, and more quickly? I would imagine all that thumb swiping on mouse pads has had an influence on how children use their hands as well.

It’s important for us not to mistake neat handwriting for good ideas, or vice versa, which is surprisingly easy to do. I do hope that the new requirement doesn’t encourage children to think that good writing is mainly about being neat. On the other hand, there is something very pleasurable in having control over your script, and if you are keen to improve your children’s handwriting, you might find the following strategies helpful:

✓ Set a regular practice time when the children write in handwriting books, for instance first thing in the morning. This is a useful quiet settling activity – writing slowly and carefully can be very calming.

✓ Encourage children to sit well when writing at a desk, and try to ensure they are at the right height for the tables.

✓ Incorporate fine motor activities such as threading, weaving and sewing into your classroom where you can. Think laterally – activities such as planting seeds and using chopsticks develop fine motor control as well.

✓ Take part in the ‘Pencil Olympics’ by doing some exercises with your children. Get them to hold a pencil and then walk their fingers up and down it without letting go.

✓ Children who are left-handed can find it easier to write standing up, and on a vertical surface. Experiment with letting children write in different positions and places.

✓ Celebrate ‘beautiful’ writing with your children. Try some calligraphy and make ‘writing beautifully’ a goal for specific pieces, not just in English.

✓ When the goal is to write quickly to get ideas down, let the children write roughly rather than insisting on neatness. And sometimes, let them throw a piece of writing away, just for the hell of it.

To spell or not to spell… the ramblings of a journey so far

Megan Dixon is Director of Literacy for the Aspire Educational Trust, a small, friendly MAT in Cheshire, also Head of Research and Development for Aspirer Teaching Alliance, Cheshire. Trained IoE, London. Taught in London and Cheshire all the way through from Rec to Y6. Master of Teaching, IoE/UCL, Master of Literacy Learning and Literacy Difficulties, IoE/UCL. Was a Nat Strat Consultant for a year.

Now, she teaches children and teachers. Love research!
Last week, I had the pleasure of going to a research poster event run by the NCTL/DFE. As part of a large research project, everyone at the event had conducted a micro- randomised controlled trial (RCT) into an aspect of teaching and learning. The choice of topics chosen by schools was very revealing. As Prof Steve Higgins commented, they seem to reflect issues that teachers and schools perceive as problematic. So it was interesting to see that at least 3 of the trials compared strategies for helping children learn to spell and two of them examined the effectiveness of the Look, Cover, Write, Check (LCWC) strategy for helping children learn their spellings. Both of them concluded that this method was more effective than the other multi-sensory and kinaesthic strategies used in comparison. However, it seemed the story didn’t end there. Drilling down into the data suggested that for the high attaining children, LCWC was as effective as the comparison multi-sensory approaches. For lower attaining children and those with Pupil Premium, the multi-sensory approach was more effective. Hmmm… I wondered why?

So what was it about the LCWC methods that was helpful for these better spellers and not so for the poorer spellers? I wonder if it was not about the spelllings as such (they were not easier or harder), but about differences in learning to learn. For the better spellers, the resources used to teach the LCWC method were very explicit in showing the children how to look at the words to be learnt. For each word, the child counted the number of letters, highlighted the tricky or confusing bit (orthographic understanding) and then wrote it. In addition, the teacher explicitly modelled how to use the task as an aid to learning, explaining her thinking all the time. The children were then encouraged to complete the task independently. On behalf of the child, this method seems to require a high level of knowledge about how words work and a good vocabulary and strong self-regulation skills to spot the patterns and complete the task.

For the children who found the spellings harder to learn, the strategies involved more action, more rhythm, more rhyme and more opportunities to write. The children were shown how to look at the words – they wrote aloud (chanting the letters), they wrote in the air -spotting the patterns, they wrote on whiteboards and paper. They developed their own chants and rhymes – exploring how the words sound and their meanings. And they repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated. Are these activities about developing strategies to help learners learn – helping the child to attend to all the information in the word? Maybe these activities help children learn how to look, how to hear and how to understand at the same time?

Berninger and Fayoul (2008) suggest there is some evidence that the phonics then spelling stages for children are being reconsidered. They suggest that phonics, spelling and morphemic understanding (meaning of the parts of the word) develop together. Perhaps the strategies for the poorer spellers help the children understand all aspects together.

So, where does that lead? Well, it seems to me that these small interesting school led trials might provide many things to ponder on….

1. We have to work hard at helping children learn to spell. A weekly list of words sent home is not enough. But what we should be do to be most effective?

2. There are different approaches that work for different children and we must ensure we provide opportunities for all of them. Spelling involves phonological, orthographic, morphological, vocabulary and syntactical knowledge (Berninger and Fayoul, 2008)

3. Maybe, it is more effective to teach children how to learn spelling, rather than teaching them words.

 Finally, I have been hunting to find any studies that might help me understand how to teach spelling. Disappointingly, I found that although lots of people have many opinions on the effective teaching of spelling, there doesn’t seem to be much recent research evidence . Even this DFE report (2012) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183399/DFE-RR238.pdf into effective writing highlights there is very little evidence on the effective teaching of spelling (p6)

 For anyone who is interested… this is what I have found so far. I’d be really interested in reading anything else. Thanks.

Sullivan and Thomas (1996) Understanding Spelling. CLPE – a bit old now….

DFE (2012) Research Brief, 238 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183399/DFE-RR238.pdf

Adeniou (2013) What Teachers should know about spelling. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lit.12017/abstract

Nunes et al (2006) Why morphemes are useful in primary school literacy?http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Morphemes-research-briefing.pdf. (2014)

Reed (2012) Why Teach Spelling Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction.

Click to access ED531869.pdf

Berninger and Fayoul (2008) Why spelling is important and how to teach it. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/254948833_Why_Spelling_Is_Important_and_How_To_Teach_It_Effectively

Martin (2010) Talk for Spelling – UKLA http://www.ukla.org/publications/view/talk_for_spelling/