Worrying about them is a waste of time when, with libraries closing and phonics on the march, there are far more serious threats to children's enjoyment of reading.
In terms of kids' apps and games, I loved Starfall, which helps teach phonics, and I use BrainPop, the educational website with videos and games, a lot now.
In particular, it calls for more whole-class teaching and the systematic teaching of phonics (breaking words down into their constituent sounds).
He has been asked to solve tricky educational conundrums before and, every time, he has managed to catch the prevailing political wind.In 2006 he reviewed reading tuition, and plumped for the back-to-basics "synthetic phonics"—to the delight of a government already mustard-keen on the method.
That recommended a return to traditional teaching methods and the increased use of "synthetic phonics"—sounding out letters and syllables in place of the methods that became popular in the 1960s, when children were taught to recognise whole words and resort to guessing when they got stuck.
As a charter school, publicly-funded but free of bureaucratic control, it can shun trendy educational theories in favour of discipline, phonics and longer school hours.In this section Will there always be a New Orleans?
And inspections of the underperforming ones often find that they make insufficient use of whole-class teaching, phonics, or other traditional methods.Such evidence was one influence behind the big shift in the Labour Party's education policies after Tony Blair became its leader in 1994 and appointed David Blunkett as education spokesman.
Whole-language holds that children learn to read best by absorbing contextual clues from texts, not by breaking individual words into their component parts and reassembling them (a method known as phonics).
In a brief period as shadow education spokesman, his enthusiasm was not big-bang structural reforms but micro-initiatives like the teaching of phonics to improve literacy.
The Government has introduced the phonics check to help ensure that children who are struggling with reading are identified at an early age, before it is too late.
