December 18, 2016 6:44 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
After a hiatus of 4 weeks I am back. While Grammar Schools continue to divide political parties, such reasons being given by nay-sayers are not even remotely near the mark. Their argument centres mainly on the fact that bright pupils from the community are needed to form the top stratum of Comprehensives/Academies. They claim those very bright children will inspire the slower pupils to achieve. Of course this is nonsense. Our country needs its bright minds and those bright minds, indubitably, develop and flower more vividly at Grammar Schools. These establishments give clever children from poor backgrounds an opportunity to reach the top fruit on life’s tree. Grammars have teachers as committed to excellence and attendance as those found at...
November 11, 2016 3:55 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
From the Times Educational Supplement of 5 November 2016, the headline: ‘Schoolgirls suffer in silence about their struggle to read.’ Leaving aside the emotive verb ‘suffer,’ more accurately applied to children in war zones, the writer is referring to the fact children, apparently girls in particular, thanks to phonics can now read every word but not comprehend every word. As my readers will know I have trumpeted phonics for 57 years, but in today’s parlance it is a no-brainer that phonic excellence goes hand in hand with dictionary skills. I would have assumed any school worth its salt would be providing dictionaries/iPads to enable their pupils to achieve excellence in both text understanding and analysis, plus word knowledge. In fact,...
October 17, 2016 5:01 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
I have always felt games provide the best way of teaching children, especially if the concept involved is fairly abstract. When my son was tiny, back in the sixties, we used to play a game which, though simplistic in nature, provided him with an excellent lesson for the future. The biscuit tin game involved placing a biscuit tin on the kitchen table (often he would fetch it himself in anticipation of playing the game). We would sit on either side of the table and he would describe the tin he could see – it had two lambs and some roses. I would tell him my tin had a shepherd and a dog on the side. We’d hmm and hah, roll...
September 2, 2016 1:35 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
A level results are out and as either exhilarated fulfilment or deep regret overcome crowds of 18 year olds, weary parents are marvelling at how fast the years have sped by. Their four year old Reception newbies are off to university. With dedicated far sighted planning your child, either about to start school or on the way through school, can be among those congratulating themselves when the time arrives. How is your teaching coming along? Are you making sure you enjoy the games and the success as much as your child? We progress to the next step and now embrace the first real phonics. Write each sound in red felt pen on a white file card, explain them and set...
August 18, 2016 3:50 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
”Come one, come all!” the barkers yell and crowds flock, drowned in the colour, the noise and the pizazz of the fair. What a shame we can’t do that with reading and yet the final rewards are not just hoop-la prizes or cheap fluffy toys, they are life-changing skills and, for small children, will establish a happy, confident and secure childhood and future. Let us proceed with the next step. Following the sound alphabet and those few sight words, your child can easily read: ‘ ”It is a beautiful little pup,” she told Jed. ”Can you let it come to my house? I can be kind to him and let him nap in the sun on your old rug.” ‘...
August 6, 2016 2:14 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
You have seen how simple it is to begin your child’s reading future. Let us examine the next easy step. When he can easily read. ‘Ben and Pip put rags, pegs, hats, figs, mugs and maps in a bag and jump on it.’ Now add the following sight words. You, the, they, I, me, no, little,your,we, beautiful, come, go, to, be she, saw, my, house, was, do, for, he. Twenty-two words which are excellent link words but which, in the main, cannot be sounded. Treat them as you did the letters of the alphabet. Each should be printed clearly in red felt pen on white filing cards. An excellent way to learn the words is to hold up each card,...
July 28, 2016 2:15 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
An interesting article appeared in the Daily Mail of 18 July 2016. Eleanor Harding quotes a report from the charity Save the Children. It underscores what I have worked hard to promote for so many years. Learning does not begin at school. Learning begins way before, in fact, soon after birth. Your child learns every moment it is awake, and what it learns is up to you. When you recite, read, and sing songs and nursery rhymes you are formally educating your child. Eleanor Harding’s article quotes from the Save the Children’s report that the result of this parent/child interaction will affect a child’s education right through school and into the world of work. It follows that if this time,...
June 20, 2016 11:52 am
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
I have never liked cliches but an apt one does spring to mind ‘my journey’ to an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours has certainly been long – 57 years, but, above all it has been wonderful and fruitful. So many children, so many tearful mums with the same story, ”Johnny’s teacher has said he’s useless.” Each child was a human being, with a life and future to fulfil. That was when the ‘magic’ happened. A handful of phonics, time, patience, love and every child became a reader. And for every little reader the world of knowledge opened up. He/she could now read the questions in maths, the information in science and could read and comprehend English. Each child became a...
June 6, 2016 1:23 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
From the mid 1960s, rules of grammar and punctuation were deemed pedantic and even unnecessary. When I asked a child to write a sentence with a verb and Johnny/Susie wrote, ”I were going to the circus with me mum and me sister,” it was not to be corrected. After all, the child had grasped the ideas of ‘sentence’ and ‘verb’. He should not be burdened with the pressures of grammar. Spelling was still near-enough-is-good-enough and red pen became an evil element that would scar a child’s self esteem and ergo, his social and emotional future. Of course, at base level, teaching became a doddle, child’s play. Teachers’ knowledge of grammar and punctuation became sketchy and marking was reduced to a...
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...
