Let's Move On From Here...

Some observations on how pupils with weaker literacy skills responded to remote learning during lockdown 2020. Background During lockdown, I was asked to be part of the team managing and supporting the “Key Worker or Vulnerable” cohort who had taken up the offer of a place in school. Naturally, I welcomed the opportunity to “do my bit” and also to have contact – albeit socially distanced – with young people. Our role was to manage, guide and support rather than teach – that would have been vastly unfair on those students not able to attend school. The result was that I spend 15 days in school monitoring the way that students – some of whom I know well – approached their work. Older, more able students, with good literacy skills, were clearly able to navigate the instructions, despite the increased cognitive load. Weaker students were not. My observations I observed pupil after pupil follow a similar pattern: 1.       Open the Home Learning portal and choos

There is no doubt that distance teaching is hard work. I am fortunate that my Team Leader is a wonderful woman who has lead from the front, so that the burden of planning what to teach and even how to teach it has been largely removed from us. We have a whole school, in-house online platform to set work and have "bought into" Century Learning which means that our time is spent monitoring, helping and supporting students. There are some online lessons, a bit of Loom, and a lot of emails and phoning home. A lot of kids are really not happy being away from friends and are really missing school; some are doing the minimum to keep my emails and phone calls at the "kindly prompt and encourage" level; some are clearly struggling. That's the bad news - and it is bad. Knowing that any child is struggling is awful and I hate it. But some of my students seem to be doing really well under the circumstances. They might be missing their friends and wishing for more free

  What Every Teacher Needs To  Know About Reading   How were you taught to read?   Can you remember anything about the process? What about learning to talk? Can you remember that? Most people will have little or no memory of the process of language acquisition beyond those cute stories we are told about the words we could not pronounce. I wanted a “big R” for my birthday. Turns out, I had seen a violin in a music shop window, and I was trying to say guitar”! The acquisition of a first language – sometimes called a “mother tongue” – seems to be a natural process which the human brain has evolved to undergo. All the evidence suggests that unless a child is deprived of linguistic input in the critical period up to the age of 5 or 6, they will generate grammar. Even silent children who do not speak will have a complete grammar by the time they are about 3 years old. The same is not true of reading and writing – those are not natural skills and we have to be taught them. The good ne