Teach Primary Issue 18.2

36 | www.teachwire.net to be carefully considered. There are many factors that could come into play here, but those you will need to consider include: genre, theme, diversity of characters and settings, contemporary versus classic texts, the range of authors and illustrators, the mix of fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and information books. The texts you choose might be linked to the school’s reading spine or be entirely separate. The complexity and level of challenge should increase across the academic year. Pre-reading For some texts, it may be beneficial to do a few pre-reading activities to enrich the children’s reading experience through increased subject knowledge or curiosity. Pre-reading activities are also T here has been a lot of debate amongst educators as to the best approach to use when trying to teach children the skills they need to become effective ‘meaning makers’ of what they have read, as well as fluent and efficient decoders. During my time as literacy lead, I was given the task of moving our approach to teaching reading comprehension away from more traditional ‘carousel’-style guided reading sessions, where pupils were working on different activities, towards a more cohesive, whole-class reading approach, where all pupils were working on the same text (see Table 1). Why, you may ask, did we do this? The text One of the things I like most about whole-class reading is being able to use a single substantial text across the week. This allows for greater interrogation of the material and means that we can get through chapters or whole texts a lot more quickly than we would otherwise be able to. It also means that I can introduce children to texts that may be deemed too challenging for them to access due to their ability to decode, rather than their ability to comprehend (the two are often very different). Text selection is, of course, key. For whole-class reading to have maximum impact, the texts or extracts that are chosen for study need especially useful for helping to identify gaps in knowledge and understanding, so that pupils are approaching a text from a more level playing field. Useful activities include: looking at the cover or illustrations to make predictions about key themes; sharing pupils’ own experiences linked to the themes, settings or characters identified from the cover; making predictions about the text based on the title. Reading The first time that the children hear the text, it should be read aloud by the teacher. In the role of ‘expert’ they model fluency and intonation. The children should all be following along with their own copies. During this initial reading, the teacher should use skilful questioning to explore some of the more challenging vocabulary, encouraging All together NOW Not sure whether to make the switch to whole-class reading? Just use these strategies and you’ll reap lots of literacy rewards, says Jo Cummins