Maybe you typed the URL wrong, Geraldine. It came right up for me: http://www.dawhat-aljazeera.com/ They do provide a lot of information about the curriculum (and other things). This is a fairly common practice for private schools that cater to the affluent and upper middle class. This school seems...

And just how well has the shame-blame-and-punish model worked so far? It is the backbone of the U.S. education system, where results continue to plummet and it's hard to entice people with barely a Grade 8 level of education to become primary teachers in many states. Is this really the way the UK w...

What's wrong with whole-school setting (Miskin's method)? Of course, nothing is "wrong" with MIskin's method (which has many similarities to whole-school Direct Instruction models). However, it would not be possible in many schools here due to legislation (we could not have a teaching group of 60 s...

I came across this article in The Guardian which is a propos of the same theme: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/mar/12/ontario-shows-support-teachers-schools?INTCMP=SRCH The piece is more editorial than factual analysis, but it does make some valid points. Sustained improvement requires a ...

In both cases, however, these people did read for pleasure for a while as children, and I think this may be necessary if the skill is to be consolidated in a way that allows it to be readily available for future use. I suspect that children who never read at all for pleasure after learning to read ...

Mention of the Piraha twigged a recollection of reading about their peculiar inability to count or even to do one-to-one matching. I found some of the original articles reposted here: http://www.jcrows.com/withoutnumbers.html and here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00.ht...

Geraldine was kind enough to put a post of mine on this topic in the "Classics" section: http://rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3230 I can only add to what I said then that it is essential to stop talking about "guessing." As the trainers say, "reinforce an incompatible behaviour." Prov...

When a Reception class teacher finds herself with children who can decode, like Jenny's grandchildren, and others who do not know a single letter/sound correspondence, I cannot imagine how she copes in a whole-class situation. It can easily be much more challenging than this. The teacher may face a...

Parents and caregivers will also find this resource useful re speech and language development of children up to age 5: http://www.theroadmap.ualberta.ca/home Of particular interest, because the explanations are clear and succinct, with examples, are the sections on narrative and understanding and u...

If teachers were in the habit of including real words that are likely to be unfamiliar to children, in their daily lessons, might that not prevent the problems described by Susan S? Probably not,because our students (who are nearly all ELL) have plenty of experience with unfamiliar words. We have a...

I would point out (and not for the first time) that there is no “Canadian Educational System.” K-12 education is entirely the domain of the individual provinces and territories; the federal government has no role whatever, either in funding or regulation. Thus, there is a great deal of variation, a...

I find the “picture” element – a picture of an alien beside the non-word – interesting, although I don’t know how, or if, it would affect children’s performance. What I have found here, testing students who are not routinely exposed to non-words or asked to decode them (even though they have been t...

I don't know of any free/unprotected standardized-type assessments, but the placement tests for the SRA programs can at least give you an idea whether a child has significant gaps in language develoipment and what they are. These are free downloads: https://www.mheonline.com/assets/sra_download/Lan...

The implications are quite clear ... these children require access to explicit structured speech and language programmes in small groups alongside models provided by children whose language falls within the average range. They have, afterall, a lot of catching up to do. The importance of this canno...