Summary This blog shows how secondary teachers can use simple tools from the phonics teachers’ toolkit to support older students…
Born Listening? Why Listening Is Hard and How to Help Your Students Listen and Understand Better.
This blog is about the forgotten half of oracy: not talking but listening. Listening is often described as the Cinderella…
Wait! Time!
Wait-Time ticks all the boxes: it’s easy to describe, easy to implement and it just makes sense. In case you…
The Simple View of Reading
Less Simple than it Looks The Simple View formula presented by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 is presented as a…
What is the next step for this student?
At the end of this post, please comment on whether writing instruction in KS3 science lessons is an appropriate use…
Good Enough Comprehension
Or not quite good enough… I’m a decent reader, but I find recipes hard to follow. The trouble is that…
Writing Full (and I Mean Really Full) Sentences in Subjects
When we quiz students for knowledge retrieval, we are helping them remember key knowledge but we aren’t helping them build…
Some Jobs Sentences Do in Science
I’ve been thinking a lot about how important sentences are in science. The new DfE Writing Framework puts sentences at…
Building Sentences in Physics – Talking Precisely about Energy at KS 3&4
It’s a mistake to think that we don’t have time to explicitly teach the sentences that students need to talk…
As, when, while: three small words that unlock meaning in physics.
In physics, sometimes the smallest words do the most work. This post is about three short, everyday words that powerfully…
Reading for Learning 