Do you work in a post-16 setting?
In 2018, I had the wonderful experience of working with a team of authors with extraordinary expertise in adult education.Together we wrote the toolkit (link below) and created trainings for professionals in the world of post-16 literacy. There are so many unique settings in the field and the toolkit can flex to work in any of them. It is based on the linguistic phonics principles which underpin That Reading Thing but it also includes much of the TRT ethos as well. Older struggling readers and spellers bring so much experience to literacy lessons, some of it very negative, and that needed to be taken in to consideration when creating a methodology for Functional Skills.
We’re proud of what we achieved and have been encouraged by the positive responses of practioners. Phonics is a powerful tool for helping older learners to take control of their language experience.
It’s a long document so, if you’re looking for a quick but meaty start, read:
- Part 1 – chapters 1,2 & 3
- Part 2 – chapters 5,6 & 7
Here’s a quote from Chapter 13. It’s from a teacher who didn’t feel overly confident after a day of training but decided to give it a go. They’d previously been working on learning words by shape.
I thought you might be interested in how I got on with my non-reader today, armed with my post-it notes and a whiteboard! It was extremely empowering for him. He wanted to do it his own way and he took the lead. He loved the whiteboard and was happy to sound out the letters and point to the post-it notes. He couldn’t believe how many words he could sound out and read. He told me how difficult it had been to sit in a class and not know the alphabet. The whole group told him how proud they were of him.
He wants to do some more tomorrow and he wanted to try and put a sentence together: ‘Going to my car’. We also did ‘upset’ and his face was a picture when he realised he could read it. Thank you so much for this; it was a real treat to watch him blossom and start to redefine himself.
Download the pdf
(We take care to keep things virus free but you are always downloading at your own risk.)
If you’d like full training and resources for using this type of approach with your post-16 learners, contact us for more information about That Reading Thing.
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