Activities to support spoken language in the primary classroom.

This article introduces the Primary English Progression in Spoken Language document. The resource takes each of the spoken language objectives from the national curriculum and breaks them down into steps for each year from 1 - 6. This article explains more.

Explicit, planned, and strategic strategies for teaching vocabulary are at the core of the Primary English approach to teaching vocabulary. However, we also love to have fun and in this article we exemplify some of our vocabulary resources and how they can help you and your class play with words.

In this article I share some of the children’s books I take to schools when training teachers and TAs about vocabulary. To know a word well requires: “Rich, decontextualised knowledge of a word’s meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses.” Beck, McKeown, & Omanson (1987). The quotation above finds its way into all the vocabulary training that I do. To me it sums up what word learning is all about.

The first in a series of posts about putting the playfulness into vocabulary learning.

In this post I consider the place of wordplay in building children’s vocabularies.