Last chance to register for LDA’s David Kilpatrick seminars

Registrations close shortly for this month’s LDA seminars by David Kilpatrick. I’m not sure exactly when they close for Perth and Cairns, but Melbourne’s close on 8th August. Adelaide & Sydney are already sold out. The seminar on the 19th at Melbourne Town Hall will include 17 supplier displays (details below) to browse from 8.15-9.00am […]

We need GOOD practice, not common practice

I wrote an opinion piece in The Age newspaper this week called “Premiers’ Reading Challenge no fun for kids who can’t read“, arguing we need to close the gap between research and practice in early literacy education, so more kids can enjoy, not dread, the Premiers’ Reading Challenge. I hope it’s helped put another nail […]

Introducing Clever Caitlin’s phonics playing cards

This year I have some excellent new colleagues, and one of them, Caitlin Stephenson, is queen of making therapy fun for kids. She grew up playing cards with abundant siblings, and came up with the idea of phonics playing cards. For an affordable, fun, social, portable phonics activity that can be tailored to a range […]

New word-building card games

I’ve been faffing around for ages trying to improve on my old word-building card games, and finally have a new set of three decks of download-and-print cards I’m happy with. These games are intended to provide practice blending and manipulating sounds in one-syllable words, and learning their spellings. The basic games are lot simpler, and […]

If you’re already using my free workbook, here’s the next one

If you’re one of the over 3000 people who have downloaded my free Letters and Sounds Phase 2 workbook since the start of the year, your learner(s) might have finished it by now, and you might want another one. You’re in luck. I’ve finally finished the Phase 3 book, which teaches at least one spelling […]

Ros Neilson on the Foundations of Early Literacy Assessment (FELA)

Last month at our office we had the pleasure of hosting Speech Pathology legend Roslyn Neilson for a talk about her newish early literacy assessment, the FELA. The FELA is intended to supersede two of Ros’s previous tests, the SPAT-R and SEAPART, and help teachers, therapists and others assess phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, which […]

Petition to dump Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention

If you’re in Australia’s state of Victoria you might have seen yesterday’s article in The Age online about a new petition to remove Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention from our government schools. It appears to have been bumped by election coverage yesterday, but should be in the paper version of The Age today. The […]