AJ Tutoring

17/06/2026

Small round up of work completed this week. Revising the soft c sound using playdough, pipe cleaners and a game of TRUGS; encouraging a reluctant writer to try and get ideas onto paper. They are great at inventing game and film concepts so we’ve already designed a poster and this week we’re writing a synopsis. We tried out a recording card where the pupil can say their sentence then write it. This went down a storm 😀 Finally we looked at adjectives and adverbs, finishing with Year 5&6 Statutory Words 😊

12/05/2026

This learner absolutely smashed this lesson today, despite the break in sessions. We looked at that tricky word ‘was’ for spelling by building it using magnetic letters, play dough and pipe cleaners; clarified which nouns need-es added when plural; looked at the grapheme ‘oa’ for long o and broke the Y3-4 statutory words into syllables to make them easier for reading. I used some resources from

12/05/2026

Looking forward to getting back into teaching after a bit of a break. Going to be focusing on Y3/4 statutory words for reading, phonic grapheme ‘oa’ for the sound long o, spelling KS1 Common Exception Words and having a chat about our writing tasks for the remainder of this term.

16/01/2026

A round up of the hard work completed this week 💪 We’ve looked at phonics thought games - Pirate Plunder (an oldie but goodie) for spelling and Linkaword for onsets and rimes. Years 3/4 and 1 common exception words - one for reading each word in 5 seconds and the other writing them in dictated sentences to embed for long term retrieval. Finally some fine motor by taking the scarf for a walk, spatial organisation (joining the dots ) and writing the letters n and h as they can be tricky

21/11/2025

Haven’t posted in a while as life seems to have overtaken but that doesn’t mean that these lovely learners have stopped working! We’ve been looking at common exception words - mainly using Wikki Stix to build them. There’s been lot of work on suffixing and by far the favourite game was Smart Chute where I’d created a bingo style grid to check off several of the suffixing rules so that, even if the learner didn’t quite get the answer right, they could still be the first to cross all off their grid and win 😊 We revised the soft c and g sounds using School House Mouse, an old game but a good one.

16/10/2025

This is so disheartening and, as Dr Naomi Fisher has pointed out, will not raise reading standards.

Today Bridget Phillipson announced that a new target will be set of 90% of 6-year-olds passing the phonics screening check at the end of Year 1. Currently 83% pass at the end of Year 1 and 89% at the end of Year 2.

They also announce a new reading test for children in Year 8 at age 13.

They say that this is because strong reading skills are the foundation for everything else in education.

These measures will backfire, and here’s why.

You can’t make children learn faster by setting more tests. You can’t help struggling readers by putting them under more pressure. You don’t allow teachers to teach better by making them teach to the test.

We are already putting too much pressure on our very young children. There is no evidence that pushing academic skills on them earlier leads to later success.

The result will be a narrowing of the curriculum, more anxiety about reading, and more children who start to see themselves as stupid and inadequate before they’ve even turned seven. How children think about learning is the real foundation for everything else. If they’ve decided that it’s boring and hard before they’re out of the Infants, then no one is a winner.

Yes, reading is important. No, more testing and early pressure isn’t the way to raise standards. It will create more of the problems the government say they want to avoid. Our children need something better.

27/06/2025

First lesson with this lovely learner. We looked at consolidating the grapheme to match the sound for /j/ and /g/. We made the letters out of play dough then sorted the missing letter cards. We moved on to two visually confusing common exception words ‘were’ and ‘where’. Drawing round wooden letters, saying the letter names and combining this with a sentence and illustration to support the word. Finally we began our work on long vowel sounds. This is such important scaffolding for learning future sounds and resources such as the ACE Dictionary.

21/06/2025

Vowels. It’s so important to know the five vowels together with the short and long sounds. Knowing and understanding this helps learners to grasp more complex sounds, vowel digraphs and how to break words into syllables. I worked with this learner to mark the vowels with their diacritical marks to show which are short and which are long sounds. Although a challenge, they did really well. We’ll build on this going forward 💪🏻

21/06/2025

Weekly roundup. Consolidating the ‘oi’ grapheme with a game of Toppling Frogs. This always engages the learner as they get excited to get as many frogs on as possible 🐸 Looking at two common exception words for Year 2, ‘wild’ and ‘child’. This learner had created an image of a ‘wild child’ so we looked at the story Where the Wild Things Are. They blew me away by reading the whole text independently 😃 We then thought of new Wild Things and gave them names ending in -ild. We’ve also looked at soft ‘c’ at the end of words: writing on cubes and rescuing a character from the caves. Finally, ended with an introduction to Flossy words.

21/06/2025

Rhyming is an important aspect of phonological awareness. It helps with generating word families and therefore spelling patterns. This learner generated rhymes for their two of their friends’ names which helped to personalise the activity. We then played snakes and ladders finding the rhyming pairs to consolidate.