Post-16 Phonics Toolkit

posted in: Post-16 & Adult Literacy |

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 … Read More

Phonics: when singer rhymes with finger

posted in: Phonics for older students, Post-16 & Adult Literacy, Secondary literacy |

I love conversations about how people pronounce words differently and knew I was onto an entertaining twitter thread when I saw a few responses to this tweet. However, reading through the thread made me feel more and more depressed about how people view phonics.  Almost every comment was about whether the girls were wrong or right rather than how we can use what they know to improve their reading and spelling. So here’s my (way too long for Twitter) response. … Read More

Post-16 Phonics in the youth justice system

posted in: Post-16 & Adult Literacy, Youth Offending |

I’ll be reposting some relevant blog items in light of the launch of post-16 phonics for functional skills in England. Phonics in this context often involves a lot of “unlocking” knowledge the learner already possesses but doesn’t know how to use. Sometimes they need to get past their anger and shame over past school experiences. Here’s one such young person. **************** Why would you work on reading with a young offender? There are plenty of reasons not to. Being in … Read More

Literacy Conversation – start with spelling

posted in: Phonics for older students, Resources and Lesson Ideas, Spelling |

What shared language do you use with your students to talk about a word they’re struggling to spell or read? We’re limiting this post to four terms: sound & spelling phoneme & grapheme Because of changes to the curriculum, your students might need phoneme and grapheme. However, I prefer to start with the familiar because older students who’ve struggled with reading and spelling in the past can feel anxious about learning terminology and recalling terms can waste precious memory in … Read More

Guest Blog: Post-16 Phonics Changed my Life

posted in: Secondary literacy |

This is a guest blog from Jo Byrne a member of the marvelous Claire Collins team. It’s beautiful, funny and wise in it’s own right, but maybe someone else will recognise themself and book their own appointment. Over to Jo:   Way back in July 2018 I embarked on a project with Claire Collins Consultancy Ltd and the UCL Institute of Education to design and pilot phonics approaches for post-16 learners (see Bit.ly/Post16Phonics). We had a cross team residential to … Read More

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