If spelling feels confusing, you are not alone. It can feel frustrating when words seem to “change their spelling” when you add endings (suffixes), and rules can seem arbitrary and difficult to learn. But here’s the good news: there just three main rules when it comes to adding suffixes, and they all exist for one simple reason, which is to protect how the word sounds.
Spelling is not a list-learning task, it is a system whose job is literally to make sense. From the very start, children must develop skills as well as knowledge and attend to units of meaning as well as sound. When spelling breaks down, the solution is rarely “more words”. Progress comes when educators focus on skills and meaning as well as knowledge. Find out how in this blog.
Talking Dyslexia Episode 6: Talking Dyslexia is a podcast from Talamo and the British Dyslexia Association. Hosted by Ellen Broome and Jamie Wace, each episode explores what dyslexia really means at school, at work, and in everyday life.
Literacy underpins every aspect of our education system—but for dyslexic learners, this can feel like a relentless and discouraging truth. Imagine if students could demonstrate their strengths across the curriculum without being limited by pencil and paper. With the rise of technology and AI, I’m hopeful that the metacognitive (thinking) process behind writing will be given its rightful place—and dyslexic learners better supported to flourish. But hope alone isn’t enough. We must get the teaching right. That’s why I welcome the new Writing Framework: too many dyslexic students reach secondary school without secure foundations, and the opportunity to close the gap has already been lost.
This is not good enough. Most children don’t learn to write through creativity alone—and many are left feeling broken by the well-meaning but misguided message that they must read and write for pleasure. What they really need is to read and write for purpose.
We’re all familiar with that moment of panic when you realise you have 10 minutes to prepare for a staff INSET and you have nothing. There’s no time to scan the internet and digest the research – you need something now! In this article I’m offering you 5 zero prep ideas for staff CPD. The focus is on dyslexia, but bear in mind that the most impactful CPD focuses on strategies for high quality teaching, which, of course, are helpful for all learners, not just those with dyslexia.
We’re all familiar with that moment of panic when you realise you have 10 minutes to prepare for a staff INSET and you have nothing. There’s no time to scan the internet and digest the research – you need something now! In this article I’m offering you 5 zero prep ideas for staff CPD. The focus is on dyslexia, but bear in mind that the most impactful CPD focuses on strategies for high quality teaching, which, of course, are helpful for all learners, not just those with dyslexia.
I’ve been in this field long enough to witness a tragic decline in services for students with persistent specific learning difficulties. Honestly, I don’t desperately care whether we call it dyslexia or something else. What I care about—deeply—is whether we meet the need. And this is a real, persistent need that affects how and whether a child learns to read and write. This is not a luxurious extra.
Morphology—the study of how roots, prefixes, and suffixes combine to create meaning in words—is vital for all learners, and an integral part of our English curriculum. By focusing on word patterns and meanings, morphology supports learners at all levels and abilities in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and spelling skills. Dyslexic learners in particular benefit from the meaningful study of words.In this blog, I’ll share ten practical ways to use Morph Mastery, a compendium of morphology resources, in different settings.
If I produced a stick of rock to represent my work (now there’s an idea!), the words inside would be “supporting schools”. I love collaboration, I love enabling, empowering and equipping in all things literacy and dyslexia, and I love schools. In this blog you’ll read about one amazing school I have worked with over almost two years, and you’ll see a video of Morph Mastery in action. Westcourt Primary School in Gravesend have not only talked the Morph Mastery talk, but they walk the walk, through thick and thin.
Our language is morphophonemic; in other words it is based on both morphological and phonological structure (units of sound). Approximately 80% of English words contain more than one morpheme. These morphemes are used across a number of words, and therefore can be generalised. They have been described by Rastle (2018) as “islands of regularity in the mapping between printed words and their meaning”. Morphology is not a whole word approach, nor is it an alternative to phonics. Morphemes literally make sense of language and they are entirely necessary as part of cracking the code of English spelling.
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