Through reading aloud, we remove the need for children to engage in word reading and this frees them up to concentrate on language comprehension alone.
Evidence from the EEF (May 2022) shows that Covid-related disruption has caused learning loss in children. There is some evidence that the writing outcomes for primary-aged and Year 7 children were lower than expected compared to previous year groups (Christodoulou, 2021, 2022). One of the common issues is that writing stamina has been heavily impacted.
The point of Questioning the Author is to get children to grapple with an author’s ideas and, if necessary, to challenge an author’s intended meaning in an effort to build understanding.
Take a moment to think about the children in your class or school. Which children still do not have good word recognition? Which of the barriers that I have outlined so far do you think might be holding them back?
Whilst for some children, working with a teacher 1:1 might improve reading accuracy and fluency, this isn’t always possible; therefore, often we arrange children into groups for reading practice.
Developing reading fluency is an essential skill for children, as the ability to read fluently not only develops confidence and reading stamina, but it also supports comprehension. If we read a text too slowly, it is difficult to keep track of what it is about.
This series of six blogs will focus on the potential barriers children may face when learning to read, as well as some possible suggestions about how we can overcome these in the classroom.
The intention of sharing this thought process is to support schools to review the learning landscape – review where the children are and warm them back into English, whilst being conscious that every school is different.
In part 1, we considered the need for a whole school vocabulary spine, in this edition, we will consider how best to teach the vocabulary that you have chosen to teach.
By the time a child is 13 years old, statistics have revealed that there is a 30-million-word gap between a pupil from a high socio-economic group and a pupil from the lowest socio-economic group. What can we do in our schools to address this gap?
