Podcast and Blog

In preparation for my new Teach Along – Writing Success in the Early Primary Years – I talked to quite a few teachers to really understand what it is they experienced when teaching writing.  There were many things they had in common, and one of them was this statement:

“I am expected to get all children writing full texts, when some of them can’t even write a sentence. It just doesn’t make sense!

As I spoke with them, I could hear the frustration and worry in their voices.  Frustration that th…

Last week’s post talked about some of the finer points of language selection to support our students' writing development and suggested that there really isn't a need to have small group instruction in order to reach every child.   What I didn’t get time to do was to explain exactly what this might look like in your classroom.  So gather round as I tell you a story. 

There was once a teacher who tried her very best every day to help her students learn to write.  She modelled using the struc…

I have said it many times and I’ll say it again.

 The simple fact is that our children don’t have enough time focusing on language at school.  Now I know that they talk to each other in the playground and that they talk in the classroom when you don’t want them to. I know that you are likely already doing some ‘talk to your partner’ in your classroom (if you aren’t, please do start) and that you are possibly engaging children in oral sentence level instruction.

Even with all these things goi…

We have all heard about decodable texts and the need to ditch 3 cueing.  It is now well established that children should only be given material to read in the early stage of learning to read that contains graphemes and high frequency words they have been taught and that 'sounding out' is the only strategy we should be teaching when children are lifting the words from the page.  However, even this switch to decodable texts does not mean that one size fits all. 

Before I talk about stud…

One of the things we can all agree on is that our curriculum is a crowded document. The expectations of what we are supposed to be able to teach, assess and track are, frankly, ridiculous.  Before I decided to ‘just keep things simple’ I felt incredibly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ I was supposed to get my little people students to know and do. It was as if I was being asked to be on some kind of teaching game show where I was put in a booth and had to quickly stuff as many marshma…

Every teacher I have every met (bar a couple who really needed to work somewhere else) has wanted to do a good job for kids. Usually we enter the profession with the genuine desire to make a difference to children and contribute something positive to society. The caring nature of teaching means that we often invest deeply in our students and give of ourselves in countless ways. Practices come and practices go and we do our best to adjust to the 'new way'. Teaching reading is no different. Prac…

There’s a funny idea that floats around in education, that the way to increase student motivation for learning is to make things more engaging.  This can mean a variety of things including making learning more ‘authentic’, giving more choice in learning activities and (heaven forbid) making learning fun.  

Let’s talk about why authenticity, choice and fun can lead us down the path to instructional ruin if not applied in moderation.

• Authenticity is a concept that we hear often. It is often ac…

I spend a lot of time interacting with teachers. Whether it is through social media, emails, Teach Along Course sessions or on the phone, they all say the same thing about writing instruction. “It just doesn’t make sense to ask a student in the early years, who can barely write a simple sentence, to write a complete text”.  Here are some of the things that I have heard:

“We skip to full pieces of text far too quickly.”

“I feel like my students just aren’t writing enough.”

“Asking all Foundati…

We have all known the feeling of frustration (and maybe helplessness) that comes with not really knowing how to get children writing.  Some kids just seem to 'get it' and will happily sit down to write a story or information report for us while others struggle along, unable to complete the task no matter how many times we go through the 'modelled, shared, guided and independent' cycle that we have been taught is the key to good writing instruction. 

When we try to figure out what we need to tea…

Have you ever reached reporting time in your semester, had a look at the ‘speaking and listening’ part of the achievement standard and realised that you don’t really have any strong evidence to assess? 

There’s also a really good chance that you haven’t intentionally planned for this beyond having children ‘do news’ and maybe participate in a group drama activity.  This is such a common story, not because teachers aren’t diligent in their duties, but because speaking and listening is somethin…