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