Ms Jennifer Baker Speech Pathologist

I feel passionate about teaching children "How Words Work", and in fact, that is the mission statement of the practice! Words need to be investigated at every level; from their inside workings through to the way they coordinate together in sentences to position readers emotionally or intellectually. Students need to learn how to analyse words and also how to control them. They need to be taught explicitly and creatively; this is always my challenge! However, as I begin the process of reducing my clinical work, I am looking forward to engaging in some projects that I have been wanting to do for many years. One of those is to conduct research into the spelling development of young children; specifically investigating how they encode long vowel sounds in simple one syllable words. Another is to work within schools, assisting upper school students to understand how to deconstruct texts, and structure essays that clearly explain what they understand about how the texts are constructed. I love mathematics (in particular formulas!!) so I teach essay writing in quite a mathematical fashion which "works" really well for many students. I also like science so the rules and explanations I provide for teaching children how to spell words also have a bit of a scientific "flavour" to them.....it's sort of when.....linguistics meets maths and science!!!