April 27, 2017 3:02 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Good news at last on the education front. The latest classroom development, announced by the Daily Mail of 15.04.2017, ‘Union members refuse to teach unruly pupils.’ For too many years teaching staff, inadequately equipped to deal with consistently recalcitrant children, have faced knives, abuse and standoffs from a spattering of young thugs. Again and again, day after day one child’s truculence has resulted in an entire lesson being disrupted or lost for the rest of the class. Quoting from the above article, ‘Some (teachers) are refusing to teach out-of-control pupils who have brought knives into school or threatened to set staff on fire and some as young as eight have been allowed to stay in lessons despite the risk they...
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,...
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...
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...
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 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...
