Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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1025 practices

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Invent words together. Say a made up word, pull it apart into its sounds, put it back, then take one sound out and hear what is left. The nonsense is the point, because there is nothing for memory to fall back on.

With a real word, a child who cannot work with sounds can often get by on memory, and you learn nothing about what they can actually do. A made up…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:31One line of research

Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.

Move the sign about. Leave the gap in the middle, four plus something equals two plus five, and watch what the child does with it. If they add…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:32One line of research

The word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.

When digits land in the wrong place, check whether the child knows what is being counted before calling it carelessness. Say the unit out loud: one…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 24:61One line of research

A child who talks well, listens well and seems bright will have their reading failure read as laziness. The strengths are exactly what makes the blame stick.

Strong spoken language, decent attention and an easy manner give an impression of capability that nobody can square with work coming back unfinished.…

Five minutes

There is more about focus, starting, and adhd than the practices: the focus, starting, and adhd area has the themes and the courses too.

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Core

Qur’an 49:11

One line of research

When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.

This is the bright child who is somehow always tired, always slow with written work, quietly memorising what everyone else is working out. The route…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:26One line of research

In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.

Only fair attention with an unusually strong working memory is a signal rather than a strength to celebrate. The memory is carrying something. Look…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 28:34One line of research

Some people get all the way to university before anything is named, then meet eighty pages of reading a night and cannot do it. Nothing broke that night. The volume simply outgrew a way of coping that had held for years.

The history reads the same way every time afterwards: always needed longer, avoided reading aloud, dreaded timed tests, stomach trouble in exam…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:286One line of research

Ask someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.

Real words can be recalled, and a strong memory will lift a score without the skill underneath being there at all. A word that has never existed…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 43:52One line of research

If a child is behind in reading, the gap rarely closes on its own with another year of the same. Asking for a proper assessment now is kinder than hoping that maturity will do the work.

National figures show reading proficiency barely shifting between primary school and the end of secondary, which tells you that catching up later is…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 16:43One line of research

Before adding more content, look at what the child has to receive it with: attention, memory for what was just said, language. Two children given the same lesson do not take away the same amount, and that difference is usually where the real gap sits.

It is tempting to answer a gap with better materials, since materials are the part that can be bought. But if a child cannot hold a sentence in mind…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 4:28One line of research

Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.

Before agreeing that a child needs phonics, find out which piece is missing. Ask them to say the sounds in cat, then to join up sounds you give them,…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 55:4One line of research

A display organised by sound rather than by alphabet gives a child more to hold on to. Let them feel where each sound is made, lips, tongue, teeth, and match that to the letters that spell it.

Reading is learned from speech towards print, so a border running A, B, C tells a child very little about what they are actually doing. Grouping by…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 26:13One line of research

If a parent has been saying since the first year of school that something is wrong with their child's reading, start from the assumption that they are right. They have watched more of it than anyone else has.

The usual story is years of being told the child is fine, a little behind, will catch up, and then a diagnosis at nine or ten when the easiest years…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 80:3One line of research

Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.

A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing.…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 16:78One line of research

Build numbers and break them up again. Seven is five and two, and also six and one, and a child who can see that has the thing mental arithmetic is made of.

Blocks, buttons, coins, anything you can push into two piles and back together. Ask which numbers fit inside other numbers and let the child show you…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 87:8One line of research

Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.

Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:25One line of research

A child who cannot bear the noise, the lights and the scratchy jumper all day will be hard to be around by the afternoon. That child usually gets described as badly behaved rather than as overwhelmed.

Once a child is understood to be choosing it, everything that follows is punishment, the arousal climbs, and the sensory difficulty gets worse. That…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 49:11One line of research

Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.

Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 30:22One line of research

When the sound scores and the movement scores are both near the floor, you are looking at more than a reading problem. That pattern needs specialist teaching rather than a general classroom programme with a bit more of it.

Naming things quickly, repeating made up words, working out an unfamiliar word: all at the bottom. Then coordination and handwriting down in the same…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:29One line of research

A child can be excellent at blending sounds you give them aloud and still not read a word on the page. Practising one part very hard does not mean the whole thing has arrived.

Where a child has had a lot of instruction in one subskill, that skill will test well while the actual job stays out of reach. So test the job itself…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:32One line of research