Miss Downs

Year 3 lead • Reading & English lead • will be studying NPQSL in Oct 2023 • Psychology BSc Hons & QTS, qualified 2017👩🏽‍🎓

[Miss Downs @leahdowns20]

“Mummy crown!”
“Shall we get dressed?”
“No. Mermaid top on”
The last of the Monday am chaos of getting us both ready and out of the door before work and nursery. So excited for 6 whole weeks off with my little beauty 🥰 just one.more.week 😅

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

I would say think about the children you know don’t read at home and probably won’t whatever you do as a school (and I’m not saying stop encouraging chn to read at home). Now imagine it was everyone. What would you do? Do that anyway.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Do you need reading records? Are they undue stress to *literally everyone*? Could the money spent on them just be spent somewhere else?

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

10. The last one is perhaps the most controversial one, but schools are too obsessed with and expend too much on energy on home reading - a thing we have no control over unless we pop round to everyone’s house.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

9. Not reading a whole novel with classes. It’s absolutely pivotal that children follow and hear full stories all the way through. A diet of extracts only wont give children as good comprehension and understanding as a whole beautifully formed story from start to end.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Similarly when reading a bulkier text in say history or geography it’s useful to stop every couple of paragraphs (sometimes every paragraph depending on the level of complexity) to just summarise the main points and their relevance to the text in its entirety.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Useful for lots of children, especially those at an earlier level of comprehending a text in its entirety. The more of this incidental modelling you do, the more the children will naturally be able to and want to do it.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

8: not summarising enough - by this I totally mean the teacher. Often at the end of reading the class novel the temptation is to go ‘and we will find out what happens next time….’. Realistically summing up what you just read and what the important parts were will be really…

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

I would say a sensible cover all objective for every single reading lesson would be: to decode and understand the text in front of me. To write this every lesson would be a waste of time.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

7: lesson objectives - it links to above really but I see lots of teachers absolutely impeded by lesson objectives such as ‘I can make sensible predictions’. This means good qs may be missed and tricks us into thinking this is a skill we can sensible track on a gradient over time

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Be better spent just reading the text.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

The other would be focusing a whole session on something like prediction by getting the cover of the book and making lots of predictions etc on what the book might be about. A pleasant session the chn often enjoy but it involves a lot of guessing and the time would likely…

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Realistically the best way to improve this is just to read quality texts a lot and discuss them. I know it sounds simplistic and over ideal - it isn’t - it takes a lot of work - but it’s almost certainly the best way.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

You can show children how to make inferences across a single text by looking for clues within that text, but it’s ruled by background knowledge and doing this one day on a text about cheese and mice won’t translate to when you meet a text about Manchester United

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

6: pouring too much energy into focusing on a ‘skill’ per lesson. I’ll give two examples of this. First an ‘inference lesson’ - often teachers say ‘my children are struggling with inference’. A simpler/more accurate way to phrase this is they are struggling to read for meaning.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

5: ‘accidental testing’ - in many schools the ‘Friday comprehension’ lesson still exists where children get handed a text, read it independently and then answer questions independently. This is an assessment. There are very few opportunities to teach in a session like this.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Every time we read the text to the children first before they tackle it independently we take away a learning/practising opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with reading it to them post them tackling it alone where they can possibly realise their own errors.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

4: teacher reading to the children. I think teachers should generally read the class novel to the children, but the children need plenty of opportunities to re-read parts to themselves plus time to read other unseen texts and read widely in other lessons across the curriculum.

[Ashley Booth @MrBoothY6]

Pouring far more energy into the children who struggle to a) decode and then b) read for meaning and thinking about what their life chances are if they leave school unable to read. We have a massive responsibility to them.