May 26, 2016 1:24 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
My family was spread out. The youngest, Kerry, is 20 years younger than myself. When Kerry was 8 years old I was a trained teacher with 6 years’ experience. When I helped her with her spelling one day and insisted, like for my own class, that the spellings were correct, she burst into tears and said, ”Mrs Plum says we only have to get the words nearly right!” That was 1964 and that year began the rot in education. From then forward hippy, creative, avant garde thinkers began to change education. Phonic reading was dropped in favour of reading books with 4 or 5 words relentlessly repeated, ‘Look, come, go,’ etc, until the child could ‘read’ the book from memory and almost...
May 22, 2016 3:53 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Two events occurred in the last few weeks, juxtaposed events that speak volumes. Firstly a teenager I know was invited to spend a week or so teaching in Africa. Other teens had described to me their disbelief when they had, on their first visit, seen how several family members would share one uniform, getting a day or a half day’s learning a week. Often they walked miles to and from school, so highly prized is education. The second thing that happened was a newspaper trumpeted the success of a father winning his battle to extend his child’s holiday into term-time in order to get cheaper travel. This ‘good news’ was duly passed around Facebook as as a ‘Yippee’ ruling. How...
May 12, 2016 2:48 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Supervised reading aloud – with an adult checking the correctness of EVERY word – should be carried out every day for every child. Reading should be done like this at school, but increasingly schools are claiming it is too time-demanding. As a result, more and more frequently, reading is being left to parents. Many parents simply refuse to help, wrongly believing that school subjects belong at school. If you are one of those or if you listen to your child while driving, chopping the beans or mixing up a cake, be warned. Poor or halting reading does not, categorically does not, ‘come good’ by Year 6. Regardless of the degree of difficulty of KS2 SATS papers, your child has to...
