[senco-forum] evidencing good practice

Found the book!  Children's Reading problems P Bryant and Lynette Bradley
0-631-13683-5.  1986.  A golden oldie.  P122 is about using letters.
Hornsby advocates using  letters in  the alphabet rainbow.

Joyce Watson's research - the Clackmannanshire study - also used letters.
I trained our Y2 TAs on synthetic phonics, using wooden letters, blending
sounds and segmenting words nto sounds.  They too were sceptical - and
dismissive of this use of their time as the logistics of withdrawal of
groups from timetable were awkward.  However, they became converts as they
saw the results... and finally came to me and said that what had made the
biggest difference to the strugglers were the wooden letters.

When you take a set of wooden letters and ask a pupil to lay them out in the
alphabet they often place them in the incorrect orientation.  To my mind
this shows that they do not have a clear mental image of the letters.  And
if they don't have that then how will they recognise letters (and you can
replace the word letter with numeral here I think) at a speed that is likely
to be useful?

One of my students could not orientate h, n or u.  Nor t or f.  Nor p, b, q
and d.  That was 10 out of 26 letters he confused.  With practice, and self
checking against an alphabet card once he had laid the rainbow out, he could
lay them all out accurately.  That kind of formative assessment does not
need peer review to show it had worked in this case, does it?

As Sharon says - find out what they know - teach them what they don't know
in a way that works for them (you do need to be a skilled teacher to work
that out).  Check and monitor along the way.  Observe, record and do not
rely on subjective assessment.

Philippa