Teach-Reading-and-Writing-Issue-21

Rachel Clarke is the director of Primary English Education Consultancy Limited. She works with schools across the UK to raise standards in English. A keen blogger, she runs primaryenglished.co.uk – a website bursting with advice and resources focused on teaching English. It’s interesting to note that pronouns are often the sticking point. Asking children to change the nouns in a short story, like the one below, into pronouns can help. The children went to the park. The children played on the swings. Then the children played on the slide. After that the children had an ice-cream. Eventually the children went home and the children told the children’s mum about their day. This type of activity can equally be used to encourage the use of pronouns for written cohesion. It’s likely that the children who are struggling to make small, local inferences are also struggling to write cohesive texts. The global level The big connections that take place across a text are sometimes called global inferences. These are the types of inferences where we may elaborate on top of what we have been told (like our grazed knee story), by making visualisations, exploring themes and forming evaluations. Film can be a useful tool for helping children to make the visualisations that will help them connect with a text. For example, if you are sharing a story about a jungle, it’s unlikely that all the class will have first-hand experience of that environment. So, sharing film clips of jungles will help pupils build suitable images. With these in place, they will find it easier to answer the inference question you may want to ask. Drawing characters and settings based on the descriptions provided by an author is another useful way to help children create visual images that will support them to build connections across a text. Annotating their drawings with information from the text will be particularly helpful if they are required to reference the text when discussing their inferences. As a twist on asking children to draw what they read, I recently used ChatGPT to create an image based on a text. The story I used was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a classic text full of antiquated and complex vocabulary that I didn’t expect my students to know. By sharing the image after reading the text, we were able to see the challenging words – crenelations, herring-bone brickwork, turrets – in context. We could then open our discussions to make evaluations about how the author had led us to view the house as a safe, warm stronghold surrounded by a dangerous, desolate world. If you’ve not tried this, I urge you to do so. Pick and mix When we identify the theme of a text, we are making very deep inferences that sit below the story or narrative. As adults this can be tricky; for children it can be very hard indeed. A technique that I’ve found helps with this, is to provide the children with a range of possible themes to explore that suit the story. So, for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, you could give the class the option of friendship, good vs evil, love or self-discovery . Encourage the children to discuss the themes and why they think they describe the message of the story. As an added extra, you could even print the themes onto cards and ask the children to place them on a target board to show their relevance by their proximity to the bullseye. ASK YOUR TA TO HELP 1 If you have children who struggle with vocabulary, asking your TA to pre-teach key words before the reading lesson can be a valuable use of time. 2 If you have children who struggle to make connections between related words, consider asking your TA to explore riddles with children, such as I have hands but no face, what am I? (clock). This playful use of language should grow pupils’ vocabularies and help them appreciate how words are related. 3 One of the barriers to making local inferences is recognising pronouns. Ask your TA to run a short intervention on pronouns for any children that need it, making sure they can match pronouns to nouns. 4 For children who struggle to infer feelings, and words associated with emotion, build their bank of emotional language by asking your TA to undertake short role play activities with them where they ‘show an emotion’. You could extend this to include synonyms for different feelings. 5 Create a collection of intriguing images. Ask your TA to discuss the images with the children, starting with the phrase “What’s going on in this picture?”. They should prompt pupils to explain what leads them to make their inferences based on the images and what they may already know. 6 Ask your TA to play the What am I? – placing sticky notes on pupils’ heads and getting them to work out who or what they are by asking questions. @primaryenglish @PrimaryEngEd _primaryenglish @primaryenglish PrimaryEng 10 | www.teachwire.net