Primary Literacy

Simple, fun ideas to help children with phonics

Literacy expert Gill Matthews, shares some simple ideas for how to make phonics learning fun and enjoyable. You may find this helpful to share with your pupils’ parents or you can adapt the ideas for your home learning plan. Phonics is about learning the sounds that individual letters make: singly… Read More

How Parents Can Support Their Child’s Writing At Home

Writing is one of the most challenging things we ask our children to do and it is hard for parents to know what’s expected in each year group and how to help their child. Literacy expert, Rachel Clarke has looked at some of the writing skills taught in each year… Read More

Letters and Sounds and Challenging the More Able Child

Teachers often get training on how to support struggling children. They spend time planning and creating resources to support those children. However, teacher training can sometimes miss showing teachers how to challenge the most able children, and challenge (particularly in phonics teaching) is regularly a focus of attention in Ofsted… Read More

Collins Big Cat Writing Competition 2018: The Courage To Write

Fear of the blank page haunts every writer, young or old. Writing this blog began with a long period of staring at an empty white space until inspiration struck and I was brave enough to set down some words, that grew to a paragraph, until finally becoming… Read More

International Talk Like a Pirate Day – Cal the cabin boy’s pirate ship log blog

For International Talk Like a Pirate Day, take a read of Cal the cabin boy’s blog about different pirate phrases he learned on his adventures aboard ship. Pirate Monday I’ll be with you in a brace of shakes! – means right away! (Before a ship’s sail shook twice.) Sailing a… Read More

Collins Big Cat Writing Competition

Entry for the 2018 competition is now closed, but you can now enter the Collins Big Cat Writing Competition 2019! To read more about the winning stories for 2018 click here. Here at Collins we’re celebrating International Literacy Day by gearing up for our global… Read More

The 2018 KS2 Reading SATs – Expert analysis

We asked Reading Detectives author and all-round Primary reading expert, Rachel Clarke, to give us her thoughts on this year’s KS2 reading paper and what it might mean for your teaching next year. The Texts This year’s KS2 reading SAT contained an information text: The Giant Panda Bear; a… Read More

Closing the Word Gap

On the 27th of April Collins hosted the first Closing the Word Gap early reading conference. The conference was led by early reading experts Charlotte Raby and Emily Guille-Marrett who discussed comprehension, fluency, phonics and reading for pleasure. We’ve rounded up some of the key findings from the day below. The… Read More

Poetry retreats for primary kids: sunsets, reflections and togetherness  

Imagine having no timetable, no classroom and no curriculum. At first glance, this idea might phenomenally liberating; we may think of all the things which we feel hold us back in our work just melting away. Or it might sound terrifying and destabilising, as we strain to imagine getting through… Read More

Why non-fiction is as important as fiction

“If a child can and does read non-fiction texts, the world is their oyster – they can learn anything and everything they want to learn.” This statement was written by tes.com writer Aidan Severs in his article ‘Six reasons why primary schools need to embrace non-fiction’… Read More