General
4 Mindful Exercises To Try Today
March 14, 2017Over recent years there has been a growing understanding of how damaging stress can be and mindfulness has become a tool of choice in terms of stress reduction for many people and organisations. So if you are new to mindfulness, or if you’ve heard about it but don’t know where to start here a […]
Promoting Positive Mental Health
March 8, 2017Mental Health is something that has been in the news quite a bit recently, and when it comes to the mental health of children and young people some of the statistics are indeed quite shocking. The figures below are taken from www.youngminds.org.uk One in Four (26%) young people in the UK experience suicidal thoughts Among […]
Games to develop auditory discrimination
October 11, 2016If Children are to learn to read they need to learn how we represent the words in our language in a printed or written form. For this to make sense they need first to ‘hear’ the sounds in our language. That is one of the reasons why the Sounds-write phonics programme is so effective – […]
Ensuring Children are Reading Ready
September 28, 2016Parents usually want to support their child(ren)’s learning and most parents are particularly keen to ensure their child(ren) become fluent, independent readers. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts any difficulties with reading will usually give rise to other problems as reading is fundamental to accessing other parts of the curriculum. Often children won’t start formal […]
How to Support your Child’s Learning
September 17, 2016It’s the start of a new school year and many children and teenagers may have started a new school and almost all will be in a new class. with a different teacher. I am often asked by parents how they can support their child’s learning – so here are a few pointers. See Education and […]
Summer Fun
July 23, 2016So once again the school holidays are upon us – for teachers that means a well earned rest, but for parents it can mean juggling work and child care and surviving holidays with children! For the children and young people it usually means a lot of freedom to do things they want and importantly have […]
What to make of Phonics results!
July 12, 2016Many year 1 children will have received the results of the phonics test. The mark is out of 40 and 32 is the mark considered a pass. A mark below this will mean that the child will be re screened next year. Remember it is a screening check rather than a test. What we know […]
Dream Big
January 23, 2016In education we talk a lot of aspirations – strongly desired goals or aims and in schools teachers are asked and expected to set aspirational targets for children. It is all about having dreams, not settling for what is easily achievable but striving for something that may at first seem unattainable. It is all to […]
Fuelled for Growth
November 29, 2015We all know that for a car to run well we have to put in the right fuel. Happily I have not (yet) put the wrong kind of petrol in my car but I know others have and I know that it doesn’t just have an impact on performance but it can actually cause serious […]
Learning from Children
November 2, 2015There are some superb quotes about children and learning and often the particular qualities of childhood they refer to, their thirst for knowledge, their spontaneity, their amazing ability to live in the moment are things we could do well to learn to hang onto as adults. Thirst for Knowledge As adults, we would probably all agree […]