Anna Saunders Tutoring

01/05/2026

Love this 😂 We’ve had silent letter day this week!

34K likes, 1.3K comments. "Silent Letter Day"

01/05/2026

Ah, the beloved silent letters. “But WHY are they there?!” my students ask… and I feel their pain.

There isn’t always a clear rule. It often comes from the history of the word or how it used to be pronounced, so it’s more about noticing patterns and building familiarity.

E.g. We spotted things like w before r (write, wrong) and k before n (know, knee) at the start of words, and b after m (lamb, thumb) at the end.

We finished with (bounce) Connect Four, earning a ball for each word with a silent letter remembered from the session. We only made it to Connect Three… this game is hard 😆 but a great way to consolidate what we’d learned!

18/04/2026

First week back! We’ve been playing a game where you hold a word in your head and swap just one sound to make a new word (e.g. cat → cot → cop → chop → shop → sheep) - much harder than it seems... It uses working memory and phoneme awareness, and can be really tricky for dyslexic learners.

Children can get really focused on spelling and forget to tune into the sounds - but this is what really supports spelling 😊

Why not earn a sword for each successful swap? Here are some Year 5 girls being genuinely terrified of Pop-Up Pirate 😄

25/03/2026

Well this was a lovely message to receive from a parent of one of my students 🥰

16/03/2026

16/03/2026

Contractions in action!
Squidging words together to understand the apostrophe’s job ☺️

12/03/2026

And why shouldn't you practise the spellings you’ve just learned on your partner’s back? Harder than I remember! 😆
Great fun tonight, even though we were tackling the spelling string
-ough - possibly the most confusing four letters in the English language... making a whopping total of seven different sounds! 😳 Well done girls - amazing work! 👏

13/02/2026

Half term already 😅 Just tidying up after the final session…

It’s been a busy few weeks and everyone definitely deserves a little reset.

Remember literacy doesn’t have to look like homework: reading a menu, an audiobook in the car, helping cook from a recipe, writing a card ❤️
All of these build confidence without pressure.

Have a lovely (if slightly soggy!) half term one and all 😊

10/02/2026

One thing I’ve learnt from years in the classroom is that children need to know they’re not the only ones finding things tricky. Specialist support is traditionally 1:1, but a lack of confidence was something all my students had in common - so I built a specialist approach that could be shared 😊 Thank you to my new parents this week for their lovely feedback:

“____ is always so happy to go to her sessions and on a chatty high when we pick her up.”

“It is really helping her confidence and giving her new tools to approach learning challenges.”

“_____ is so keen to come - the last thing we want is to force her to do extra school work, but to her it’s fun and enjoyable so an absolute winner!”

“It’s a lovely pairing and she’s so happy to learn this way.”

27/01/2026

A lovely moment tonight - one student shared she often mixes up b and p when writing (a very common confusion in dyslexia).

Another replied, “I don’t know anyone else who does that… I do it too!” 🥹

Just a couple of the reasons why I’m loving paired sessions so much - reassurance, connection, and finding your tribe ❤️🧡💛💚💙