Guided Reading: From Good to Great
Thoughts and ideas from the Primary English experts on how to move your guided reading practice from Good to Great.
Good books to read aloud
What better learning is there than learning to listen; to enjoy the cadence of a voice as it takes you on journeys to other worlds; to experience vocabulary beyond your reading ability, words that wouldn't arise in your daily interactions; to take time out for pleasure; to learn to remember and resume with a narrative; a chance to predict, to make deductions and to problem solve. Reading aloud to children opens up a new space in the classroom, somewhere where the ordinary pressures and hierarchies of school dissolve.
Forbidden Food in Stories
Food appears in many stories, often as a vehicle for moving the narrative forward. In this article we consider where food features in well-known stories and how children can use these examples in their own writing.
10 ways to use word clouds in the classroom
Word clouds are a popular way of representing information and they can be seen everywhere. But how can we use them in the classroom? Here's a list of ten easy tried and tested ways to use them to support teaching and learning.
Watching the Detectives: Teaching Inference and Deduction
One of the all-time most popular Primary English articles which looks at the age-old problem of teaching inference and deduction in KS1 and KS2.
To boldly go... and come back again: voyage and return stories
A hugely popular article looking at voyage and return (sometimes called home-away-home) stories. The article refers to well-known children’s stories and films and shows that knowing the structure of these stories can support children with their own narrative writing.