Love of Literacy
This year I have been really enjoying my inquiry, which is concerned with raising my students achievement in reading. At the start of the year I focussed on increasing the amount of discussion in my class, however I then changed to increase the reading mileage for my students reading below 13 years.
I started by scaffolding my students with discussion, before they went off to read or write. We also held debates using the points the students recorded in their writing and I gave my students opportunities to share their creations with each other later in the week. As such, rich discussion was occurring throughout the week.
However, I realised that to directly accelerate reading progress, I needed to increase the reading mileage of my reluctant readers. As such, I began giving them a couple of 'main texts' (e.g. two school journal stories) a week. However, I did not increase the mileage of my students reading above their chronological age, as they already read in their spare time. Instead I gave them one challenging text and a few smaller texts; following the idea of reading widely and deeply on the same topic.
Now we have started a unit on Genomics, so I need to support my students with the scientific vocabulary. As such, they are going to read a scientific text as one of their main texts every week. These will be short but complex, so we will be reading them closely to extract information. Other than this, we will continue using as much discussion as possible and I will vary the texts that I read with my groups.
I started by scaffolding my students with discussion, before they went off to read or write. We also held debates using the points the students recorded in their writing and I gave my students opportunities to share their creations with each other later in the week. As such, rich discussion was occurring throughout the week.
However, I realised that to directly accelerate reading progress, I needed to increase the reading mileage of my reluctant readers. As such, I began giving them a couple of 'main texts' (e.g. two school journal stories) a week. However, I did not increase the mileage of my students reading above their chronological age, as they already read in their spare time. Instead I gave them one challenging text and a few smaller texts; following the idea of reading widely and deeply on the same topic.
Now we have started a unit on Genomics, so I need to support my students with the scientific vocabulary. As such, they are going to read a scientific text as one of their main texts every week. These will be short but complex, so we will be reading them closely to extract information. Other than this, we will continue using as much discussion as possible and I will vary the texts that I read with my groups.
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