Former Ashville College student, Katie Higham, has been running free Phonics sessions to help parents during school closures. For the first two weeks of school closures, Katie ran Facebook Live Phonic sessions aimed at 3-6 year olds to help parents who are at home trying to home school their children.
Alongside this, she has worked to add to her bank of pocket-size English and Maths revision cards, creating a new range of Spelling boxes including, Phonics Flashcards, High Frequency Word cards and Spelling boxes that include word list cards tricky word cards and homophone cards – all in line with the National Curriculum. Katie’s cards help parents support their children in their learning.
Mum, Amy Melling said:
Katie’s phonics sessions have been a life-saver during school and nursery closures. My little girl is due to start school this September, and I was worried she was going to fall behind with the great progress she has been making at nursery. Katie’s teaching is engaging and has also helped me to understand how to help Grace learn all the sounds! I have now bought the Phonics cards and am helping her myself with more confidence.
Katie is a mum of four and was a teacher for seven years before setting up Katie’s Classroom in 2016.
Katie said:
While teaching I realised I wanted to help parents understand how their children were being taught in the classroom, and to provide them with a service that would explain lesson terminology and methodology. I created a website with hundreds of maths tutorials for children in year 3 up to Year 6/SATs/11+ covering all the topics and learning objectives in the National Curriculum. The subscription provides extra support for learning Maths in the home. I then added to this with the pocket-sized revision cards for English and Maths, from Reception age all the way up to Year 6/SATs/11+.
More from Katie:
- Katie’s Classroom was established in 2016. Before I had my four children, I was a teacher for seven years and I taught in both state and private schools. During my career I taught in one of London’s leading preparatory schools, which was deemed outstanding by Ofsted twice while I was there. I have also tutored privately for ten years, successfully preparing children for their SATs, 7+, 8+ and 11+ exams.
- While teaching I realised I wanted to help parents understand how their children were being taught in the classroom, and to provide them with a service that would explain lesson terminology and methodology. I often heard things like, “James can’t do bridge division and I tried to explain it to him but he wouldn’t listen to me. He kept saying ‘that’s not how we learn it at school’.’”
- I believe teaching should be totally transparent. What if helping your child with their homework could be simpler, less stressful? What if there was a bank of information that within a few seconds could tell you exactly what number bonds are or how to identify a complex sentence?
