Read Speak Write

As part of my Masters of Speech Pathology, I've been diving into early language development. This video shows that babies only learn new speech sounds through real human interaction, not screens or recordings. It reminded me of Steiner's image of the real candle flame versus the battery-powered one. Human presence matters, even for the tiniest learners (Kuhl, 2010).

The linguistic genius of babies | Patricia Kuhl http://www.ted.com At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans a...

✏️ 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗶𝗽 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆: Spelling success through partner dictation!
Pair up students to practice spelling words: One student reads the words and the other writes the words. Then they check the spelling and swap roles. Simple yet effective! What's your go-to spelling activity?

In a digital world, it’s tempting to think handwriting is optional.

But neuroscience says otherwise.

Writing by hand activates the brain’s learning networks — integrating movement, vision, proprioception, and language into one powerful, multisensory experience. Typing can’t replicate it.

If we want children to build strong literacy foundations, handwriting isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s essential.

Paul Kirschner’s blogpost, Make the Connection, explores research by F. R. (Ruud) van der Weel and Audrey L. H. van der Meer from the Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Their studies add a compelling new dimension to understanding why taking notes by hand — and learning to recognise and recall letters through handwriting — leads to deeper learning than using a keyboard.

This is a great piece by Pam Snow on NAPLAN. Whether you love it or loathe it, the reality is that if a school performs poorly, it’s a sign that teaching needs to improve. I’m absolutely in favour of schools publicly celebrating strong results. Among the many injustices teachers endure, acknowledging the impact of high-quality teaching is more than justified. And to be honest, I don’t mind if they rub it in the noses of schools that deliberately avoid evidence-based pedagogy. The extraordinary results being achieved by disadvantaged schools also leave none of us anywhere to hide. The time is well and truly up for the soft bigotry of low expectations.

If NAPLAN was football, we’d cheer the goals This week, 2025 school National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data was made publicly available via the My School website. In an increasingly data-savvy education sector, school leaders, teachers, policy-makers, academics and other stakeholders have accessed media good-news storie...

With explicit instruction and instructional understanding, students with Dysgraphia can thrive.

This makes so much sense! I’ve gone down a massive research rabbit hole after reading this thread and my eyes are now open.

I’ve taught spelling using Spelling Mastery for several years (and even did additional training with NIFDI in Oregon), but I’ve often found myself pausing when teaching -tion, -sion, and -cian as morphographs.

Spelling Mastery takes a pedagogically pragmatic approach rather than a linguistically pure one. It teaches -tion, -sion, and -cian as separate morphographs because they represent distinct, visually stable spelling patterns. The goal is to help students spell what they see accurately, even though, morphologically speaking, this isn’t quite correct.

I have to admit, I feel a bit liberated after finally understanding this properly! I’ve always sensed that something didn’t quite sit right when teaching that section of the program, now it all makes sense. Thanks, Kylie, for helping me see it clearly!

All students really need is to understand that the true suffix is -ion (meaning “act of” or “result of”) and that the spelling changes slightly depending on the base word. Eg:
t + ion → tion (act → action)
d + ion → sion (expand → expansion)
c + ion → cian (magic → magician)

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Explicit Teaching is essential, but I recall Dr Nathaniel Swain once saying something along the lines of ‘you can teach the most amazing explicit lesson, but without reviewing and checking for understanding, there is no way of knowing if the Child has learnt’. So the importance of reviewing explicitly taught skills multiple times, applying the skills in multiple ways with guidance & independently, and giving space for a child to almost forget before reviewing again to check that the child has learnt the skill is just as important as explicitly teaching the skill!