Sling Shot Educa8ion

21/09/2026

Read → Unpack → Retrieve → Organise →Write:
The writing came after the thinking.

18/09/2026

15/09/2026

15/09/2026

Bridging Spelling, Reading and Writing

It captures the key message that these should not sit as separate pieces of literacy teaching. What students learn about words in spelling needs to be recognised when reading and then applied when writing.

A simple line underneath could be:

Learn it in spelling
Recognise it in reading
Use it in writing.

13/09/2026

Short vowel pattern and a few book examples

12/09/2026

A fun way to learn letters and sounds at home. Our fridge a letter wonderland.

10/09/2026

From reading to writing: when retrieving the facts is hard 📚✏️

Writing goal this week: one topic sentence with supporting details.

We read a short science text, The Blue Planet. I read it aloud, students followed, and we reread. Then we used a brain dump to retrieve what we had learned.

Here’s what stood out. Students struggled to pull out the key facts, even after hearing the text more than once.

So we went back to the text. What has the author told us about water and its forms?

We reread and pulled out the key information together. As we progressed, we also unpacked vocabulary such as evaporation and condensation.

Since then, I’ve built in more support from the start, using a graphic organiser and explicit vocabulary support to help students retrieve and organise what they have read before moving into writing.

Teaching, noticing, adjusting, and responding.

05/09/2026

Making intervention connect with the classroom

This week, our class topic gave us the perfect context for revisiting parts of speech in intervention.

Using a space-themed diamante poem, we worked with nouns, adjectives and verbs — identifying what each does, selecting vocabulary that fitted the category, and then using those words purposefully in writing.

🌍 Earth
✨ colourful, amazing
🪐 orbiting, spinning, moving
🌙 galaxy, stars, moon, planets…

What we liked about this activity was that the grammar wasn't taught in isolation. Students were drawing on knowledge from their current space topic while thinking explicitly about how words function in sentences and writing.

It was also a useful reminder that intervention doesn't always need to sit apart from classroom learning. Sometimes the classroom topic provides exactly the context we need to revisit language knowledge in a focused and accessible way.

Same topic. A different instructional focus. I had several options depending on the year level I was with.

Happy to share a copy.

05/09/2026

When sounding out is accurate, but blending is still hard…

During a Reading Pathways fluency session, this student could identify the sounds, but reading was still slow and effortful as he worked through them individually.

I used magnetic letters to explicitly model how to move through the sounds and blend them together.

By the end of the lesson, he was beginning to blend.

A small shift, but an important one. Knowing the sounds is one step; learning to bring them together smoothly is another.

01/09/2026

Making spelling words work a little harder 🔎

This week with a Years 5–6 group, we took some words from their MOV / MOT / MOB spelling focus and went beyond simply learning how to spell them.

MOV / MOT / MOB → MOVE

We investigated word parts, meanings and the connections between related words. The spelling words became the starting point, rather than the endpoint.

There is good research behind this too. Hiebert, Goodwin and Cervetti highlight the value of thinking about vocabulary in morphological families, where knowing one member of a family can help provide leverage for understanding others.

And the best feedback? Every student commented that it was fun! 😊

A lovely reminder that we can take the words students are already learning and use them to build richer vocabulary and word knowledge.