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The importance of oral language for student learning – less teacher talk for more student language!

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Overnight, I’ve become an author of a new book, COVID Conversations: Helping children understand what’s happening!

This started as my own personal therapy, coping with missing my granddaughter during lockdown time – and now it’s a “real book” that’s on Amazon, as Kindle and hardcopy printed in Australia, in Melbourne.

This is a wonderful new direction for me, and along with COVID, it’s changing the ways that I work to support children, through their teachers and their families, both parents and grandparents!

Buy my book here

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Apologies for this late post for this week!

Like many of you, the start of this school year has been fast paced, and I have to admit to sometimes being overwhelmed by it all? Even though I’m not in the classroom, at the coalface of teaching and learning – this always hits me hard!

I’ve just posted this information on the Science of Reading Facebook page, and so I wanted to post it here as well!

I TOTALLY believe that the quality of your instructional materials, AND the quality of your explicit teaching strategies are VERY important. Without these two ingredients – students’ learning is likely compromised!

There is a lot happening at present about High Quality Instructional Materials, and how important these are! This has come to me through EdReports, and this link takes you to a webpage titled “3 ways to know if you’re using high quality Science Materials”…

I have their first report on this, email me if you want this…

What I specifically mean is the quality of the “teaching examples” – if these are not great examples for students to learn with, and, at some stage, don’t present a range of examples for each concept, then learning won’t really happen. For example, in reading, you want to start with maybe short “a” sound, and then introduce long “a” sound, once short “a” is mastered (and maybe other short vowel sounds? In Maths, one of the errors students make is in numbers with ZERO and subtraction, so these types of examples need to be included and explicitly modelled, with guided practice, and much deliberate practice. This all needs to be part of High Quality Materials. and also I have just signed up for 2 webinars on Amplify…, and I can forward you the email I received, or Google Amplify) I don’t know what the content will be – I just know that it is DEFINITELY the quality of your teaching materials that makes a difference to how students learn! Hope this is useful, and I’m looking forward to learning more in their webinars!

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