Blasts from the past - some reflections on my work to date

[debbie]

"A blast from the past" is someone or something that evokes a sense of nostalgia.

I was just trying to put our latest new website url into the internet when I accidentally came across a link to these events below (via a previous Phonics International website) - 'blasts from the past'. As 2016 ends and we enter 2017, now is the time of year for reflecting on the past and setting goals for the year ahead so good timing to revisit various developments in my work over the years:

Launching the Oxford Reading Tree Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters programme in Scotland in 2010:

http://www.syntheticphonics.com/ort.html

The Oxford Reading Tree Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters programme for infants, for which I am the phonics consultant, was launched in 2010. Nick Gibb, Minister for School Standards, launched a statutory Year One Phonics Screening Check in England in 2012. Feedback from some schools using the Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters programme shows that Year One children can attain much higher than the national standards for the phonics check. I certainly would expect results of 90% to 100% of the Year One children reaching or exceeding the 32 out of 40 benchmark.

Read Sam Bailey's comments about the results of children in 2014 in a primary school after a change to Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters (right hand column on this page):

https://www.floppysphonics.com

Sam then moved to another primary school with very low national results and took my material and methods to that school. Sam talks about results, changes and improvements from changes with the same staff and children here (and she has now gone on to share her findings and good practice with other local schools):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKAZ9HUn2ho

By the way, I am no longer Oxford University Press's 'official' training provider but I still train in the ORT Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters programme!

It's very heartwarming for me to see photos and a description of this event (below) in my home years ago - with the wonderful Coral and Grace (with a pop-in visit from Elizabeth too). They all continue to train in systematic synthetic phonics internationally. Grace has gone on to actually write a systematic synthetic phonics programme for teaching Spanish (Phonics International Limited) which a number of schools are using in South America!

https://phonicsinternational.com/visitors.html

Read about Grace and her Spanish programme here:

http://gracevilarphonics.weebly.com

This was an interesting training event (below) as I was invited to provide training for a theatre company! I learned that there are tutors involved in this organisation who were being encouraged to use my Phonics International programme to support the tutoring of older students. In truth, I am no longer in touch with this company but I was very pleased to be able to sponsor and support them at the time:

https://phonicsinternational.com/Complete_Works.html

[debbie]

Oh my goodness, here is another 'blast from the past' - a record of our first TES exhibition in 2009. We no longer do these exhibitions, however, because they are inordinately expensive to hire an exhibition space/stand:

https://phonicsinternational.com/sen_exhibition.html

But one really significant development stemming from this particular exhibition was meeting a student-teacher who described how she knew all about my work and Alphabetic Code Charts through a lecturer at her uni (the University of Cumbria) who had discovered my free Alphabetic Code Charts and promoted them widely.

From this introduction, I went on to meet Ruth Harrison-Palmer and provide some gratis training events at two campuses of the university and subsequently developed a relationship with the university based on training/advising student-teachers and local teachers who work collaboratively with the university.

Years later, the University of Cumbria reviewed my Phonics Training Online course launched in 2015 and we have subsequently developed a partnership whereby completing the online training course can underpin and lead to a university-supervised project for 20 level 7 Masters credits!

You can read more about this exciting development here:

https://phonicstrainingonline.com