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What follows is for professionals who are offering phonics advice to parents and/or teachers. Please check all your content, especially when stated as ‘rules’, against a credible source, i.e. make it ‘evidence based’. Errors happen and I depend on people to be gracious when they spot mine, but the example below is … Read More

Today’s guest blog is from Georgina Mavor, senior That Reading Thing trainer from Western Australia. Her background in psychology gives such depth to her work with students who struggle to read and write. I’m thrilled to be able to share her wisdom here. In That Spelling Thing workshops, most of our discussion … Read More

As so often, it started with a tweet when a teacher asked: Does anyone have any tips or tricks for teaching pupils (read: me) how to remember the spelling of camouflage? Ideas were offered by people self-described as KS3/4 teachers of physics, maths, English, French, science, biology, RE, heads of year, departments, … Read More

I asked some teachers what kind of errors their students make and this answer grabbed my attention: Forgetting simple rules – e.g. /ee/ at the end of a word is ‘y’, etc. My first thought was that some students might know words like ‘agree’ or ‘tea’ or monkey’ but lack the language … Read More

A homeschooling parent has written asking for help teaching complex subject words including ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ with her dyslexic teens. Here’s the answer based on the strategies in That Spelling Thing which is available from Amazon in your country. First, I want to stress how much I had to slow down and … Read More

Note: This is controversial and only for when you are completely confident with the TRT approach and for use with older learners who have struggled for years to remember the difference between ‘to’ and ‘too’. It’s not an initial introduction! It’s beautiful when it works but requires a good long discussion and … Read More

There is a big gap between sending home spelling lists and teaching spelling, but taking the time to close that gap is worth it in so many ways, not least for those students who will otherwise go through life saying “I can’t spell”. This photo, used by permission, was posted on a … Read More

Do you play spelling games in your classroom? If yes, do you use Scrabble tiles or similar? If you’re trying to help your students create a consistent spelling strategy which also supports word reading, be cautious with spelling games. If you’re playing games with letters rather than graphemes, you’re unlikely to make … Read More