May 1, 2020 11:49 am
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
If young Ben reads to you while you are preparing dinner and you hear a smart delivery with few hesitations and a confident, snappy pace you may assume your ten year old is a whizz. No problems, a star reader. But this could be a grave mistake and Ben may well be heading for big problems at secondary school because, in fact, Ben can barely read at all, he is illiterate. Today, there is very little formal reading carried out in schools. Occasionally, hesitant readers are given time out with a classroom assistant. But as there will probably be several remedial readers with a brief time slot and no more than a passing nod in the direction of phonics, these...
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...
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...
