iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

French has one word for the whole country going back after the summer. Not just schools - parliament, the law courts, the theatres, and the publishers, who hold their novels back all summer and release them together as ‘la rentrée littéraire’.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

A trilingual children's dictionary in a shop window in Cordes-sur-Ciel — Occitan, English, French. Willans made his name writing deliberate nonsense. He wasn't wrong about this. Language doesn't just express thought. It shapes it. You can only see how your own language thinks when you've stood insid

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

For families with a diagnostic report this summer: a plain-English guide on the Compendium to the assessments in a dyslexia or SpLD report - CTOPP-2, WISC-V, TOD, YARC and ten more, plus what standardised scores, percentiles and confidence intervals actually mean.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Inside Glücksburg Castle on the German-Danish border, last summer. Lahiri puts this in the mouth of a character in a novel about living between two worlds. You're inside, looking out at somewhere else entirely. That's the feeling.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

'journal' has meant 'the daily one' since the mid-14th century - it just keeps changing what it's daily about. A book of church services, then account-books, then diaries, then the newspaper (1728).

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

My orchids — they thrive on neglect, which is the only reason I still have them. Every one an orchid, not one the same. Twain wrote this in 1888. Close isn't the same as right. Happy and joyful. Sad and devastated. The gap between them is where precision lives.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Baguettes near Calais, on the way to the tunnel. Buy three, get one free. Bacon wrote this in 1625. Some books you grab quickly and consume on the journey. A few you take your time with.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The churchyard next to our house. Funke gives this to a character called Mo in Inkspell. I have books I've read five times and each one holds a version of myself I'd half forgotten. Both strange and familiar — she's right.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Hollowpox, publication day. My cherries. My garden. Entirely real and entirely somewhere else. Ephron nailed it — reading is escape and the opposite of escape, sometimes in the same afternoon.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

There is a street in Honfleur just called ‘Rue de la Prison’. English took ‘prison’ from French in the 11th century; French had it from Latin ‘prehensionem’ ‘a taking’, from ‘prehendere’ ‘to seize’. A prison is, underneath, simply ‘a taking’. [link in post body]

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Daunt Books, Marylebone, a few weeks ago. Books arranged by country — every shelf is somewhere you could go. Seuss wrote this for children. It works for everyone standing in a room like this.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

There's a small sting in 'proper'. The respectable sense - correct, decent, done the right way - is the newest part of it, only recorded from 1704. Further back, it just meant 'one's own', from Latin 'proprius'.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

If your child's stuck behind a pen licence: start with the tool that works. Then know your ground - schools must make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act, the duty is anticipatory and doesn't need a diagnosis. Link to the full article in the thread.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Lascaux IV in a heatwave — cool inside, 17,000-year-old paintings reproduced on the walls. Humans were creating long before they were writing. Robinson spent his career arguing that education strips creativity out of children. Seventeen thousand years of evidence suggests we're getting the prioritie

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The pen licence. Neurodivergent students rate themselves low as learners; comparison drives it (Glazzard 2010); and performance rewards dent intrinsic motivation while praise builds it (Deci, Koestner & Ryan 1999). No one's studied licences directly - link to article in thread.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Does a pen licence improve handwriting? No one's tested it. But the research is clear on what does: explicit, individualised teaching (Santangelo & Graham, 2016). And working-memory limits don't yield to 'try harder' (Melby-Lervåg et al, 2016) - link to full article in thread.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

My shelf, when my oldest were toddlers. Adult books, well worn. Paterson's point isn't just about what you hand a child — it's about the environment reading lives in. Children know when books are for something.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Most vocabulary teaching asks children to memorise words - hard going for a dyslexic learner. Teaching words as things that are built ('port' = to carry, so transport, import, export) works better, and the evidence is strongest for struggling readers. New in the Compendium:

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Red kites from our garden. One has gone; one hasn't yet. James wrote this in 1899 and it's still a good description of reading fluency. Before it, effort. After it, sky.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

My son just finished Year 7 without an EHCP. His brother had one — very different experience. I've written what I wish I'd known before September: CTF transfers, report timing, the mid-June SENCO window, reasonable adjustments from day one.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Hope at the Natural History Museum. Blue whales aren't extinct — which is the point. Darwin said a language, like a species, when extinct, never reappears. A language dies roughly every two weeks. It takes its whole way of seeing the world with it.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The phonics screening check starts Monday for Year 1 children in England. If you're worried about your child's reading — here's what the check can and can't tell you, and what to ask your school: greatexpectationseducation.uk/parent-carer...

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

The building is fixed. The ivy did what it wanted anyway. Chomsky said language works like this — the grammar is the stone wall, what children do with it is the ivy. Same rules, never the same twice.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Just had my first SAR data through. That’s a parenting milestone, yes? 📍 Castelnau-de-Montmiral, Tarn #SENDparents #parentcarers #SEND

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

A teasel follows precise mathematical rules it knows nothing about. Lévi-Strauss said language works the same way. Children have the deep structure long before we teach them anything. What we teach is just the surface.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

‘Buttercup’ is one of English’s clearest compounds: ‘butter’ + ‘cup’. But the Latin genus ‘Ranunculus’ (‘little frog’) tells a different story. A May word shaped by colour, structure, and the habit of noticing. Full post: greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-word... #Wordhord #etymology #struct

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

A Roman mosaic floor in the Dordogne — every tessera placed by hand, one at a time. Atwood wrote this in a poem about teaching a daughter to spell. Same principle. Not the grand gesture. The next piece, placed deliberately.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Mid-March, first warm evening, lit a fire immediately in case it was the only one. Hugo understood the same urgency about reading: catch the spark when it's there. Every sound counts.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Old English 'scoh' meant a covering for the foot. German has 'Schuh', Dutch has 'schoen', Swedish has 'sko' (pictured here, a Stockholm shoe-repair shop). Romance languages went another way - French 'chaussure', Italian 'scarpa', Spanish 'zapato'.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

During lockdown I made bread every day. Same ingredients, different results depending on what you brought to them. Reading works exactly like that. Locke knew it in 1706. We're still catching up.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Comic books aren't something to graduate from. Martin's thousand lives are available in any format. A child reading Dog Man is doing the same thing as one reading Dickens. Possibly faster.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

The French word 'phare' means lighthouse — and headlight. It comes from Pharos, the Greek island where the most famous lighthouse in history was built around 280 BC. So famous it stopped being a name and became a word. New word card in the Wordhord — bit.ly/4voQXvp

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The more that you read only works if you can read. Decoding isn't a phase you leave behind — it's the foundation everything else sits on.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

The Old English word for 'ceiling' was 'hūsheofon'. House-sky. By 1503 it was gone - replaced by 'celynge', meaning to cover or conceal. But the Latin 'caelum' (sky) may have influenced 'ceiling', so there's a ghost of sky still hiding in it. (Image: Henry VII Lady Chapel, Westminster Abbey)

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Kipling said this to surgeons. He wasn't talking about spelling lessons. But the mechanism is the same: words do things. Which is why it matters which ones a child has access to.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Four in a Row for the 'ss' sound. Works like Connect 4 - she has to read the word to claim the square. Games over word lists. The decoding still happens, but her attention is on winning, not on the effort. She always beats me. Why this works (and why guessing isn't reading):

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world' Wittgenstein meant this philosophically. The transfer to vocabulary is direct: learn the prefix, learn the root, and you're not acquiring words one at a time anymore. #morphology #vocabulary #SENtuition

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Fluent readers don't experience reading — they just do it, the way you don't notice air. Which is why it's hard for them to understand what it costs a struggling reader to get through a page.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Annual review. 30-page EHCP amendment document. 2,000-word email to a SENCo. 7-page document requesting changes to an SEN plan. Two out of four children. One day. This work is painful — these are your own children you're describing. Parent carers do this constantly, alongside everything else.

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Crocuses surfaced here after weeks of cold rain. ‘Crocus’ comes from Greek ‘krokos’, meaning saffron — a dye and spice that travelled Mediterranean trade routes long before English lawns. New Wordhord post: greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-word... #WordOrigins #StructuredLiteracy #SpringVoca

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Daffodil begins as Greek ‘asphodelos’. Its botanical twin, ‘narcissus’, comes from ‘narkissos’. In parts of Europe it’s the ‘Easter lily’. In older English, the ‘Lent lily’. One flower. Two histories. Full Wordhord study: greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-word... #etymology #daffodil #sprin

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Snowdrop. A word that falls through winter. ‘snow’ + ‘drop’. A transparent compound. Meaning built from two visible parts. German: ‘Schneeglöckchen’ — little snow bell. French: ‘perce-neige’ — pierce-snow. Swedish: ‘snödroppe’ — structurally parallel. Different languages. Different noticing. T

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Snowdrop. A clear English compound: ‘snow’ + ‘drop’, first recorded in the seventeenth century. German and French forms reveal different noticing — shape, movement, season. Etymology as structured vocabulary teaching. #etymology #structuredliteracy #winterwords

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

A ‘seuil’ is not the door. It’s the stone beneath it. From Latin ‘solea’ – the sole of a foot or shoe – the word names the place where the foot lands when you cross in or out. A threshold is contact before concept. bit.ly/ateliermots

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Reposted by Joanna MW

Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

A ‘clé’ is what opens. A door. A system. A piece of music. From Latin ‘clavis’, a key or bolt that controls access. Whether written ‘clé’ or ‘clef’, the logic is the same: access comes first. bit.ly/ateliermots

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Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

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Reposted by Joanna MW

Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

‘Mozzarella’ means ‘a little cut piece’—from Latin ‘mutilus’ via Italian ‘mozzare’. A word shaped by the same gesture that forms the cheese. greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-words-words-words/mozzarella

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Reposted by Joanna MW

Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Ricotta comes from Latin recōcta ‘recooked’—a word that still carries the heat of Roman dairies. Explore its story: greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-words-words-words/ricotta

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Reposted by Joanna MW

Joanna MW @jbalaena.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Ours still isn’t as thin as a true Neapolitan, but the word ‘pizza’ has travelled further. First written in 997 AD, it may come from Greek ‘pitta’ for ‘cake’ or Lombardic ‘pizzo’ greatexpectationseducation.uk/musings-words-words-words/pizza

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