Hi everyone
Here are some notes from last week's meeting on the Phonics/Literacy side:
Reading for pleasure
Ruth’s challenge to us was to evaluate our approach to reading, particularly whether we are as focused on children developing a love of reading as we are on children’s mastery of synthetic phonics
Her presentation was influenced by ‘Building Communities of Readers’
(Building Communities of Readers - UKLA; Teachers_as_Readers_FINAL_TO_KH.pdf (open.ac.uk))
Some key questions:
• Is Story Time done well?
• What does independent reading time look like? If it’s silent, it’s probably not very effective
• Does your school have ‘texts that tempt’?
• If children are asked ‘what’s your favourite book?’ and ‘what’s your favourite author?’, do they have a strong answer straightaway…?
• What is the impact of your reading strategy on volitional reading – whether children choose to read for pleasure?
Vocabulary instruction
This was influenced by ‘Bringing Words to Life’
(Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction: Amazon.co.uk: Beck, Isabel L., McKeown, Margaret G., Kucan, Linda, Pikulski, John J, Silverman, Rebecca D.: 8601405872920: Books; Study Guide: Bringing Words to Life: Second Edition: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (guilford.com))
Some key questions:
• Does your school have a strategy for teaching vocabulary?
o Is it systematic?
• Do we rely on ‘word/s of the week’ or ‘word walls’?
o In order to help each other out, it will be great if you would do a bit of reading, finding out, figuring out, speculating by yourselves and then share your thoughts/plans either with me or with the whole group*, including potential costs. We can then define what our test/trial in the Spring term looks like.
Mark