Classroom Literacy Routines
Welcome to another school year. With new students and a renewed vigour, this is the perfect time to establish routines and procedures which will facilitate the smooth running of the classroom literacy program.
We all appreciate how difficult it can be to fit quality instruction, differentiated learning and the independent practice of skills and knowledge into a busy timetable.
Be flexible and strategic when planning for literacy timetabling. Remember that it is not necessary to have an hour or two hour block; though this is certainly helpful.
There are some non-negotiable inclusions when providing quality literacy instruction. We must make time for the explicit teaching of problem solving actions. Shared reading, read aloud or guiding the reading are useful approaches for large group explicit instruction.
We must ensure we are responsive to the needs of small groups and individuals as we coach students to apply the problem solving actions so rigorously taught. Guided reading provides rich opportunities for teachers to explicitly coach for the transference and generalisation of strategic activity within authentic reading contexts.
Finally, we must provide plentiful opportunities for students to develop control of problem solving activity without support. We must see evidence of: successful independent problem solving with increased speed and efficiency and attention to the meaning and convention cues which guide prosody and regulate fluency.
At every year level we must aim to:
- continue to extend reading knowledge and skills by carefully observing what students do, what they try to do and what they must learn to do as they actively problem solve texts
- see evidence of independence.
If we don’t, students will always require support.
For those who may be struggling with how to put this all together, particularly new or returning teachers, we are currently developing a one-off workshop (New & Returning Teachers Workshop) to support you. Further details will be posted over the next few weeks.
My keystage leader told me that in Guided Reading each pupil in a group reads out loud. That sounds like ’round robin’ to me. I told her I thought the pupils had to read to themselves. My class next year is Y2 (6-7-year-olds). For my lowest group I may need to listen to each child individually. Is that appropriate? Thanks
My understanding was that in guided reading each student reads an instructional level text independently to themselves; the teacher listens to one student at a time and coaches and supports them to implement strategies to successfully decode and understand the text. The teacher also fosters and supports rich conversations about what has been read. Student does most of the work and the teacher does some as opposed to shared or modelled reading where the teacher does most and all of the work.