BLOG FEED

Two children can receive the same test score and need completely different support. A mark tells us how a child performed, but a diagnostic assessment can help reveal where the difficulty actually begins and what needs to be taught next.

They’re not dumb. They just don’t know. I’ve been thinking about how much less of the world some of our children get to experience, and what happens when we then ask them to read, infer and write about things they have never seen, felt or known.

Who teaches the storyteller how to read aloud? Nobody sat with them and explained that a full stop means the voice drops and the breath comes. That a question should lift at the end. That a villain should sound different from a hero, and a frightened child should sound different from both. Nobody gave them a worksheet with arrows showing where to pause for dramatic effect. They learned it the way all real learning happens. By being inside something long enough to understand i

Sunday mornings in my childhood home had a sound. My mother would blast the radio. Vintage calypso. Sparrow. Kitchener. Stalin. I did not know then that I was being educated. I know it now. This is what that education built, and what its absence costs in the creative writing classroom.

Every year I ask a class of students if they know Cinderella. Blank stares. Harry Potter. Nothing. Papa Bois. A goat man, one child says. These children do not know stories. Not ours. Not anyone else's. And that absence is not just a cultural gap. It affects how they read, how they write, and how they perform when it matters.