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Early reading, literacy & numeracy (early years and Primary) Expert Group

Public·19 Colleagues

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

D
L
F

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