There are a whole range of skills children need before they can become competent readers and spellers. It’s not just about sitting down and teaching your child to recite the letters of the alphabet and to recognise some words. The more well-developed a child’s pre-reading and pre-writing skills, the easier the process of learning to […]
It’s the summer holidays. Our first instinct as parents is a sigh of relief – no more packed lunches, no more homework! Unfortunately learning loss over summer is a real problem and this is particularly true for younger students and for students with a learning difficulty. Research suggests students may lose more than one month […]
A study by Sarver et al. (2015) has found that children with ADHD performed better on tasks that require concentration when they sat in a swivelling chair. However, for typically developing children, the opposite was true in that the more they moved the more poorly they performed. The authors believe that allowing ADHD children to […]
The Alphabet Tree by Leo Lionni provides a nice analogy of the writing process. The story begins with the letters living individually on the top most leaves of a tree. Similarly, when you begin to learn the alphabet code you need to understand the code represented by each individual letters. However, by themselves these letters […]
Many older children, especially reluctant readers, quickly stop reading their chosen book, usually with the reason that, ‘It is boring!’ Many of these children choose books based on the illustration on the cover of the book and perhaps the title. This means that there is often a mismatch between the actual story and the children’s expectation […]