Professional Development for our teaching staff.

At the beginning of the year all teaching staff attended a Staff Only Day that involved learning how the brain learns to spell and read.  The next step has been for Darnelle to model these explicit lessons in all classes across the school.  

Learning Matters are supporting us to deliver a school-wide spelling programme.  It is an approach that supplements our Literacy Curriculum. This means all teachers are teaching in a way that ALL brains learn to  spell. This is happening in the same way across the school. Children are learning from 5 years old to be automatic in sound-letter correspondence (just a few at a time to start - both reading and writing), word level and sentence level reading and spelling and then into text. There are many parts to being a good speller and reader and it also takes many years of deliberate practise to become a good speller and reader. 

This professional learning will continue throughout the year. It is an exciting journey for our staff as they learn a new approach that is backed by the science of how the human brain learns to read.