Hello again!
I meant to write this on the Anzac Day long weekend in Australia. I love a long weekend for any reason although I’m sorry soldiers had to die for this one. (Dear foreigners: look up Anzac Day on Google. It will tell you a lot about the Australian character and something […]

“Wombat loved Christmas. He loved the carols and the candles, the presents and the pudding, but most of all he loved the bush Nativity play. For as long as he could remember Wombat had wanted to be in the Nativity. Now at last he was old enough to take part . . . ”

When people […]

“There was once a baby koala, so soft and round that all who saw her loved her. Her name was Koala Lou. The emu loved her. The platypus loved her. And even tough little Koala Klaws next door loved her. But it was her mother who loved her most of all . . . ”

Like […]

“I’d dance with a pig in a shiny green wig
But I wouldn’t say boo to a goose!’
I’d ride on a ‘roo to Kalamazoo
But I wouldn’t say boo to a goose!’
I’d jump from a mountain right into a fountain
But…”

(In Australia and in England, and I presume in the other countries of […]

“Hattie was a big black hen. One morning she looked up and said, ‘Goodness gracious me! I can see a nose in the bushes!’ . . .”

At a reading conference in Hong Kong in 1984, I attended a workshop in which rhyming, rhythmic books were read aloud interactively for over an hour. It was brilliant. […]

“One summer, Jessie’s father invited all the family over for a barbecue. When Grandpa saw Jessie he said, ‘My, how you’ve grown! You’ll need a new pair of shoes this winter and I’ll buy them.’ …And her dad said,’I’ll buy you some socks from the local shops to go with the shoes from Grandpa. And […]

My adult autobiography, the Australian edition, is out of print.

The USA edition of the same book. It has a slightly different first chapter as well as American terms and spelling, but essentially it’s the same book. And it’s still in print.

Quote from Chapter 10 : In late November 1977 I decided to have a mole […]

Quote from Chapter 5: “Lessons from a home”:
“Long before they enter school, children achieve a number of significant skills at home, none of which is specifically taught. They learn how to sit up, how to walk and talk, how to dress themselves, and how to eat politely, more or less!
They acquire these skills because they […]

This book was written with Lyn Wilkinson, one of my dearest colleagues. It was updated and re-designed in mid-2009.
As university teachers, Lyn and I realized that all was not well with the literacy of our students, which is a polite way of saying there was a great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever […]

The Place Of Passion In The Development Of Literacy
What has passion to do with literacy? What has hairdressing to do with literacy? What has literacy to do with ironing? Can a three year old begin to learn to read in fifteen minutes? Do the Beatles have a message for teachers of reading? Are these questions […]

A Talk For Parents On Teaching Children How To Read Before School
If I were the queen of the world, teachers wouldn’t have to teach children how to read; which is not say, I hasten to add, that learning to read is not essential. Rather, children in my ideal kingdom would learn to read easily, long […]

Current Realities In Whole Language
This article was first presented as a keynote speech at the August, 1992 Whole Language Umbrella Conference. Because of the proximity of the conference to the Niagara Falls, the falls themselves became an essential element in my speech. For this reason I decided to retain the immediacy of my talk rather […]

Winning The War Between Books And Television
Television will not go away. It’s here to stay and its attractions are many. One way of doing battle with it might be to get rid of it completely or to turn it off most of the time but in most homes that would now be very difficult. Rather […]

Towards A Theory Of Why People Write
(This article was first published in ‘Language Arts’, Vol. 65 No. 2 Feb. 1988)
I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the […]

Fox and Wilkinson ‘94
Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when it was announced that Sydney would host the year 2000 Olympics? I’m Australian and I was working in Guam at the time of the announcement about eight years ago and I remember how excited I was. Time has flown since […]

Try as we might, none of us will ever be perfect teachers. The most we can hope for, in our quest to be God, is merely to improve a little as the years go by.
How might we do this? By going to conferences, listening to and observing other teachers, writing reflective journals, chatting on […]

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