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- Title
Rhyme and Ritual: a new approach to teaching children to read and write.
- Authors
Merttens, Ruth; Robertson, Catherine
- Abstract
This paper concerns an approach to raising literacy standards which is rather different from the prevailing orthodoxy– theRhyme and Ritualproject. The project is run by the Hamilton Reading Project, which comprises a series of initiatives funded by the Hamilton Trust, an educational charity, and implemented in fifteen primary schools in a large and socio-economically deprived city area in southern England. It incorporates both a supposedly‘old-fashioned’ traditional notion– that children can be supported in learning to read through approaching a text known off by heart (the phrase is important, since the text must not only be familiar but also pleasurable to the individual child)– and also the currently valued approach of expanding and extending children's appropriation and use of elaborated language, particularly in relation to imaginative, descriptive and expressive writing. It is the former aspect of theRhyme and Ritualproject, namely the provision of short texts to be memorised by young children and then read from‘text only’ books (with decoration but no illustrations) that we believe is uncommon as the basis of an educational initiative with the overt aim of raising literacy standards. The article gives a detailed outline of this initiative, with its two-pronged and‘pincer’ approach, and also some indication of how it is succeeding.
- Subjects
ENGLAND; READING; IMAGINATION; READING enrichment; LITERACY; LANGUAGE arts; RESEARCH
- Publication
Literacy, 2005, Vol 39, Issue 1, p18
- ISSN
1741-4350
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1741-4350.2005.00393.x