Reading time: 3 minutes
The pandemic caused a massive loss in learning, particularly reading. Pupil’s mental health and well-being were also impacted and improving this will still take time. It’s crucial to support children’s development and aspirations and this can be initiated by implementing fundamental reading skills.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Catch-up learning is the order of the day – with students three months behind on learning, and some students have fallen up to 12 months behind where they should be.
Literacy and numeracy are essential skills for everyday life in adulthood – this means it is critical that these skills are taught as a matter of urgency.
But how can catch-up learning be supported in core subjects? This blog post explains.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
EDArcade can play a crucial role in saving children’s education.
Our aim is to pioneer reengagement for students in education. This report has suggested that up to 20% of pupils are currently undertaking less than one hour of schoolwork per day.
Working with you, we can support student catch up; help pupils to understand tough to teach topics, improve confidence and enjoy learning again.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Many parents are unsure how to entertain their children following school closures announced on Wednesday.
The decision has crated an uncertain time for parents and pupils. Many parents do not want education to cease.
But how should you keep children occupied during the period, and how can you ensure education continues? This blog post is the top 10 educational games to keep children occupied.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Maths is an essential in everyday life. We use mathematics concepts each day in our lives (often without realising). The subject governs everything around us and without a good understand a person could encounter difficult problems in life.
There is a reason why maths is one of the first subjects we learn at school.
This blog post explains the reasons why maths is essential and you can use online learning to improve your ability.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
In 2016, the OECD examined the literacy rates of 16- to 19-year-olds in 23 OECD countries and came to a startling conclusion – England occupied the bottom spot with more than 1 in 5 young adults having a low level of literacy.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Throughout UK schools, there are more than 300 languages spoken as a first language.
While proportionally ESOL students account for just under 7% of pupils, in inner cities this percentage can often be as high as 75%, as is seen in various schools in London.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Reading for pleasure is starting to feel like a lost art. It is something that every primary school student is encouraged to do but they often find other pastimes more appealing as they grow up.
Whether this is due to lack of motivation at home or at school is often down to individual cases. Reading is an important tool for every child and adult, as it keeps the imagination active and also helps to further learning in general – deepening cognitive ability.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Numeracy – it’s often not the easiest of subjects to teach, even when you have all the passion in the world.
Engaging children in numbers can often feel one of the toughest of all teaching nuts to crack. If this sounds familiar, games could well present the answer.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Maths + Fun = An impossible equation? Not necessarily.
Whether you’re a teacher or parent, attempting to engage an unwilling child in maths can sometimes be difficult.
Here are some simple and effective ways to make mathematics fun (for motivated kids and learning that sticks).
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Games have been employed in schools, in one form or another, for decades.
Yet today we’re only just coming to realise the true potential power of gaming, and beginning to understand that the advantages go beyond convenience.
Here we inspect just how powerful a resource games can be for boosting literacy skills.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
You may have heard the news. Apparently handwriting is soon to become obsolete.
However, for those of us who are dedicated to the idea of writing being indispensable, comfort can be taken in the fact that the death of writing (and reading) was discussed as early as 1987 and then promptly rejected by commentators.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
More than 1.2 million children in the UK have dyslexia, a disability which results in difficulty reading and understanding the meaning of the words in front of them. Many children who have dyslexia have said that the words they see do not stay still. Instead, they move around the page, affecting their ability to read them.
Unsurprisingly, dyslexic students can find themselves falling behind others in the class, resulting in performance issues.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
How does one go about raising the numeracy skills in youth who, for a great majority, want little to nothing to do with math exercises?
The solution may be found through an integration of sports and numeracy skills.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Not having numeracy skills can have a long lasting and damaging effect on life as an adult. Lack of numeracy can affect behaviour, employment prospects, lifeskills and the overall attitude to the future.
To minimise the risk of this happening after a pupil leaves school, all issues with regards to numeracy must be addressed as early as possible to help a low numeracy child become numerate.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Students who struggle with literacy or numeracy barriers can often have low self-esteem as they become more and more aware of their differences to their classmates who do not have the same struggles. This lack of self-esteem then becomes a barrier to them overcoming their difficulties, as they lose the will to try new tasks or commit themselves to activities that challenge them.
Raising the self-esteem of someone who has a genuine barrier is tricky, as their doubts have a basis in truth. You need to avoid false praise or platitudes and instead target things they really are good at to begin with. Build up their basic level of confidence and some of this will transfer onto their academic work.
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Reading time: < 1 minute
World Book Night is an annual celebration of reading and books that takes place on 23 April. It sees passionate volunteers give out hundreds of thousands of books in their communities to share their love of reading with people who don’t read regularly or own books. World Book Night is run by The Reading Agency, a national charity that inspires people to become confident and enthusiastic readers to help give them an equal chance in life. World Book Night
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Reading time: 2 minutes
English is often a love it or hate it subject. For those pupils who enjoy great literature and poetry, they look forward to exploring the pages of the texts they are studying or letting loose their creative imagination in writing fiction which explores their thoughts and enables talent to be seen.
For those who do not enjoy English, it can feel like a dull experience they are forced to attend, either because they can’t relate the work they are asked to complete to any part of real life or because of low literacy levels and any associated learning difficulties.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Those who perform poorly at school overall are the most likely to have poor reading and writing skills. Socio-economics play a large role in the profile of a pupil with low literacy along with gender.
It has been evidenced that boys are twice as likely as girls to have low literacy skills at the point of leaving school and this barrier can really hold those affected back when looking at career and lifestyle choices.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Engaging teenagers in Maths and English can often feel like an uphill struggle – particularly if their levels of numeracy and literacy are low. It’s even more of a challenge to emphasise and convince them then that these are probably the two most important subjects to focus on when planning their career path.
Where being a celebrity is now a very popular answer to ‘what career do you think you want’ and then specific replies being that being either a footballer, model or reality TV star is at the top of the list, there’s a falling perception in some teenagers that Maths and English are of any value.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Raising engagement in maths – and in turn attainment – is a major focus of every school curriculum policy. Looking at ways to motivate and enthuse pupils in a subject where some have always struggled isn’t easy.
However, there are ways to stop the jumble of figures being seemingly meaningless both on the page and in real life and to illustrate ways to put together the parts of the jigsaw which makes up the whole subject.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
The traditionally taught methods of maths are being challenged by those who feel that the future of the subject should be less about the mechanics of maths and more about the concept of the subject and the practical uses. There are calls for maths to become more about everyday use than currently taught and less and less about the theory behind how the maths works.
In essence, the thoughts are that learning about what algebra is should be replaced completely in the future with how it’s used in everyday scenarios.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
The overarching aim for English in the National Curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.
The syllabus for English in the new National Curriculum has been under fire in the last few weeks. This week the OCR draft English Literature syllabus appeared to have dropped US works such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steiner’s Of Mice and Men and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Over the past few weeks there have been several national days and weeks to promote reading, such as World Book Day. There are still more of these to come in the form of International Children’s Book Day (2nd April).
These have been great ways for schools to encourage their pupils to read for pleasure and share their views and opinions of the books they read. This has been achieved in several forms, such as dressing as their favourite book character.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
I don’t think anybody would be surprised by the notion that maths is often considered unpopular. Indeed one of the biggest barriers to engagement with maths seems to be the reputation it has in society.
In his book, Rethinking School Mathematics, Andrew Noyes identifies the social barriers pupils experience in regards to maths, and the fact that textbooks’ attempts to connect maths problems to real life situations often fail as “there is a real difference between what many teachers and textbooks perceive to be real-life mathematics and what people experience in their lives”.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Last month we took a look at how the art of storytelling could be used in the classroom, as inspired by National Storytelling Week.
We have another great reason to look towards the educational opportunities to be found in the world of literature tomorrow in the form of World Book Day. This yearly event is another fantastic initiative to promote a love of reading in both primary and secondary schools: “It’s a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and (most importantly) it’s a celebration of reading.”
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Reading time: 2 minutes
“National Storytelling Week is about giving out to all cultures, tales that give a twinkle to the eye, that raise a question in the mind and stories that have survived the brightness and the shadow of man’s imagination.” (Society for Storytelling, 2014)
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Reading time: 3 minutes
From September 2014, the new National Curriculum will require a greater depth of study of Shakespearean texts. The Telegraph reports:
“All pupils will be required to learn at least two of the Bard’s plays in full between the age of 11 and 14 – up from one at the moment – as part of a wide-ranging plan to drive up education standards.
The move follows criticism of the existing curriculum amid claims pupils can leave school without studying anything more than bite-sized extracts of Shakespeare’s most famous plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and Romeo and Juliet.” (The Telegraph, July 2013)
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Reading time: 3 minutes
An article in The Telegraph at the beginning of January identified that 120,888 children are currently at risk of becoming NEETs because they “perform below national averages in the three-Rs” (The Telegraph, Jan 2014).
Statistics from June 2013 show that 15.5% of 16-24 year olds in England were NEETs (DFE, June 2013). With pupils now having to stay in education or training until the age of 17, moving to 18 in 2015, will this prove to be the magical solution for reducing unemployment for young people?
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Making the move from primary school to secondary is a daunting experience for many children and, as a result, it is a transition that needs to be as smooth as possible.
The percentage of pupils that received a Level 4 in their KS2 Sats results in reading, spelling and mathematics has risen slightly compared to the 2012 results. However, it is still evident that a ‘significant percentage of pupils are leaving primary school without a sufficient grasp of reading, writing and maths’, which adds more stress and strain for all the staff involved (The Guardian, September 2013).
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