Nice resource/info/ideas website run by an ABA parent

[moondog]

I don't know this people and there are some recommendations on this website I am a little dubious about BUT it is great, with tonnes of nice ideas and links and examples as well as lots of photos of activities and room layouts.
Someone has obviously gone to an enormous amount of work to share the fruits of their labours.
Here

Thank you! I feel like I've stumbled on a treasure chest.

Lougle, Lovely Colleague and I looked up Read,Write Inc. on train on the way home.
Looks great.
Yes, Ruth Miskin, a very respected name.
The key principles tally with those that define D.I.

D.I. folk very particular about giving their stamp to programmes however and 95% of DI seems to be going on in America. It would be interesting to know how familiar she is with DI/

Yes, I looked her up and there is no mention of Direct Instruction (big DI) but lots of mention of direct instruction, if that makes sense.

I'm really impressed with it because her school takes it very seriously. They test every 6 weeks, each and every child. They keep the test records in their learning journals. They stream across the whole of Key Stage 1 (year R -year 2) and the children are split into groups of 6 with all staff taking a group. The staff are rotated each 6 weeks, too, so the children have no association with a teacher having a 'good' group or a bad group. They also teach the graphemes along with the phonemes.

My only observation is that for DD3, she is grasping the graphemes/phonemes but hasn't transferred that to being able to read yet. She may well be more confident at school than home, but at home she tends to try and guess from the pictures.

Sounds like a great school with a sound grasp of quality reading instruction who prioritise accordingly.

They do the whole reward thing, too. The children are allowed to make up celebrations which follow the RWI format. So in November they chose 'go fireworks, go fireworks, pow, pow, pow' and the teacher goes wild with them 'setting off fireworks' because they worked hard.

It really ties in with spelling, too, because Fred Frog can only speak in pure sounds. The poor frog can't blend (awww, poor Fred). So when they're spelling, the children use their Fred fingers to count the number of sounds in a word and then they write the spellings of those sounds.

They also have cool ditties for the sounds. DD2 knows them all by heart. If I say 'ow', she says "do you mean 'ow' brown cow, or 'ou' shout it out?" If I say 'oo' she says "oo, poo at the zoo."

I'll shut up now

Oh yes they do, Moondog. The literacy coordinator analyses the data and if a child isn't progressing as expected, she goes to the teacher/TA to find out why. For example, a girl made fantastic progress in year R, then made virtually no progress in year 1. She investigated and realised that it was because she had been in hospital most of the year (cancer).

Sounds fab! :)