Reading

Room 9's Reading Programme

Reading happens throughout the whole day in Room 9 through our topic inquiry, writing, and of course through our daily guided reading sessions. 

The children in Room 9 are moving from 'learning to read' to now 'reading to learn'.   During Guided reading time we use the Bloom's Taxonomy approach (higher order thinking skills) to help us gain a deeper understanding of what we are reading.  

The children will often be working on one piece of text a week which gives them the chance to engage in the text and apply each of the higher order thinking skills.  

As well as our guided reading sessions the children have many opportunities within the classroom to engage in reading.  We often begin our daily reading sessions with either a  class shared book, or poem, where we can model and practice fluent and expressive reading, we discuss our understanding through a variety of questioning,  use of vocabulary, phoneme awareness and punctuation. 

The children also have daily S.S.R (Sustained Silent Reading) for 10 minutes a day where they are encouraged to read independently.

The children also enjoy being read to at the end of the day.

Reading Process strategies to reinforce:

·    If you come across a word that you do not know the meaning of or how to say, continue reading to the end of the sentence, thinking what the word could mean.

·    Look at the word.  Are there any parts of it that you recognise?

·    Reread the sentence, thinking what the word could mean and how you could say it.  You can check the meaning of the word and how to say it in a dictionary.

Questions that may help to spark discussions during home reading

Here are some different types of questions that you could ask your child about their story they are reading.   The idea of these questions is to spark a discussion and make children think deeper about what they are reading about.

Setting:

By looking at the opening paragraphs of the text discuss what they know about:

·      The time

·      Time of day, period, weather, season

·      Characters involved

·      Atmosphere, tone and mood of the story

·      Writers style and pace of the language

·      Have you ever been to a place like the one described in the story?  How did you feel about it?

·      Can you imagine this plot in a different setting?

Characters:

·      What do you think the characters in this book are going to be like?

·      Find language in the text that describes a character, behavior, appearance and personality

·      Have you ever met people like the characters in this story?

·      Can you think of a time when you have acted like the characters in this story? Why? How?

·      Did any of the characters behave unexpectedly? What was unexpected, and why didn’t you expect it?

·      Do you think the characters dealt well or badly with the problems in the story?

How would you have dealt with them?

What do you know about people like this? (Jobs? Habits? Culture? Other things?)

·      How well do you think the illustrations depict the characters?  What sorts of illustrations are used?  Would you have illustrated them differently?  How?

Plot and Storyline

·      Were some parts of the story more important or more exciting, or less clear than others?  Which were they?

·      What do you think the story will be about?

·      How did you feel at the end of the story?  Why?

·      What parts of the story did you like best? Why?

·      Do you think the story could have happened in real life? Why? Why not?

·      Where do you think the author got the idea for the story?