Over the summer Jessie and Nicky attended two conferences to present information about the VaRiSS project. Jessie attended the conference of the Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading in Hawaii (yes, Hawaii!) and Nicky attended the Child Language Symposium in Warwick. They presented data from our first experiment showing that children and young adolescents are more likely to learn the meaning of new words when they are taught with the visual word form available. For example, they are more likely to learn that a wimple is something that a nun wears if they have been exposed to the written form of the word wimple as well as its sound and meaning. We had some excellent feedback from other academics and from practitioners working with children. We will also be sharing these results with teachers at various events next year. If you would like more information about this study then do get in touch: jessie.ricketts@rhul.ac.uk