AS IN THE LONG AGO

A BBC B microcomputer  32 KB of RAM The first computer printer to enter my life was a dot-matrix printer attached to a BBC computer in a primary school. When children entered my Reception class I used to sit down at the computer with them and get them to tell me stories about their lives, just a couple of sentences as a rule. Then I'd print the stories nice and big on a sheet of A4 paper and they'd draw a picture and I'd stick them all in a big book. Those books must have been read hundreds of times, each child reading their own story to anyone who would listen. From this simple activity they learnt a fundamental lesson. Writing was a way of communicating their thoughts and ideas to other people. Writing was important. THEIR writing was important. Of course, the key thing here is turning the things children say into words on a page, and writing it by hand is almost as good.  But seeing the words in print does add something, and that was especially so when compu...

The Nottingham Tram Map There are many different ways of learning to read and the route my four-year-old grandson has taken is a new one on me. He has learnt the names of all the stops on the Nottingham tram lines, together with the automated announcements that go with them, and now, looking carefully at the words, he is gradually learning to recognise them. In the long ago, had he been in my class, he would have started a project on trams. We would have made a tram journey game to play with his friends. We would have played pelmanism and snap with cards with the names of the stops written on. We would have sorted them in different ways — lanes, roads, streets, vales. We would have made model trams.  We would have worked out how many people would fit on. We would have written stories about trams and photocopied them so we could read them together as shared reading books. I could go on, probably forever, but at least for half a term. We always tried, back then, to start from...