Guided Reading at Milton Court Presentation for parents Monday 1 st February 2016

What is guided reading? Guided reading is a daily lesson that takes place in all classrooms from year 1 to year 6 The session lasts for 20 minutes (approximately) During the session, the aim is for children to progress in their reading ability… Generally in schools this consists of a set of activities for children to access while the teacher and teaching assistant read with some children (on a rota basis)

How do children learn in guided reading? The focus has generally been around questioning… Children / adults will read a shared text and then the adult will question the children to try and ascertain their level of knowledge eg ‘why did the man say that?’ or ‘can you sound that word out for me?’ Historically there hasn’t been a clear focus on what is being ‘taught’ – more of a focus on what is being asked of the children through questioning

Two aspects of reading… Decoding ▫Decoding is the process whereby children are able to identify what the words on a page ‘say’. This is PHONICS – the ability to decode a series of letters into various sounds that make sense to the reader/listener Comprehension ▫This is a massive part of reading. Decoding allows us to recognise what the combination of letters ‘say’ but what they ‘mean’ is comprehension. ▫Historically we have asked lots of questions to try and work out how much children understand about what the words ‘mean’. This works but there needs to be further focus on ‘teaching’ children how to comprehend what they are learning.

Big ideas We have defined 8 big ideas within reading: ▫Decoding – Understanding the letters on the page ▫Choice – Understand impact of word choices, language features and structure ▫Context – Experience, discuss and recognise a range of fiction, non- fiction and poetry and identify social, cultural and historical contexts ▫Interpretation – Explain and discuss books – ideas and opinions. This is about inference, deduction and prediction ▫Oral retelling and performance – Being able to retell stories without the text in front of you ▫Organisation – Understanding the structure, organisation and language features of different text types ▫Retrieval – Understand what is read – retrieve information from the text ▫Viewpoint – Understand the main ideas, themes and different viewpoints. Recognise own viewpoint and how that might be the same or different from others.

Guided reading now Each week will have one of the big ideas as a focus Children will know the focus of that week eg interpretation, retrieval etc The guided reading lessons on at least 2 days of the week will be learning about the comprehension skill with shared examples / discussions etc Shared reading sessions lead by adults will have questions that focus on the shared big idea Reading for pleasure features in every classroom every week. During this time, children will be reading something that they want to. Adults will, on occasion, question them in line with the identified big idea.

Working together We will publish, on the newsletter (from the start of term 4) what our focus is for the week We will produce a set of documents that provides the key statements for each ‘big idea’ for each year group and the kind of questions that are linked. These will be published on the website (We have a new website coming soon!) When you are reading with your child, think about the questions that you could ask that will link to the big idea of the week.

Any questions?