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 17, 2016 4:30 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Oh dear, the first episode of Child Genius and already the metaphorical guns are out and taking aim. ”Poor kids,” I was told, ”bullied and pushed into achieving,” they said, ”child cruelty” and the one I personally dislike, ”let kids be kids.” Emily Martin of the Cambridge News of 16 July 2016 calls it, ‘Channel 4’s sanitised version of the Hunger Games.’ Sorry Emily but you just do not understand bright children. Children will always be children and bright children automatically turn learning into a game. Extremely bright children love learning. They sop up facts, dates, figures – anything and everything their wonderful brains encounter, while still being children. My own son never spoke until age three due to constant...
July 4, 2016 2:25 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Number? Well, yes. Once upon a time there was simple addition, multiplication, division and subtraction. We all learned these drills and the easy methods to carry them out. By the time we left school we may not have been too hot on simultaneous equations, or applying Pythagoras but our very basic drills were set in stone. Then hoved into view the ‘experts.’ They changed old methods to ‘simplify’ them for slow learners. But, big problems arose. As I have said many times, parents provide the golden element in their child’s education. They are the people who deal with homework, parents shine a light into those dark, fearsome corners of a child’s misunderstanding. New maths, however, is simply not understood by...
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 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...
