Supporting Emergent Readers

I am working collaboratively with my team, to help emergent readers make progress.

Key Strategies: 
* A collaborative approach: two teachers co-teaching home groups
* Decodable books to assist phonological awareness (The Little Learners Love Literacy series)
* Ongoing monitoring, with running record assessments every 2-4 weeks for target students, and letter-sound and/or high frequency word tests for target readers
* Parents supporting literacy time - we train these parents in running simple, targeted word games
* Professional reading, see notes below
* Observations of colleagues, see note below

Data & Assessment 
End of Term 2, 2020: 19/43 readers from two home groups, are at or above standard on our Reading Wedge Graph. 24/43 readers are below standard.

Professional Reading  - Marie Clay 
Teach students to:

• Monitor: notice when reading isn't correct, and make an attempt to identify issue or correct it.
• Check: that reading looks right, sounds right and makes sense
• Search: look for information to help correct an error (e.g. looking back at letter sounds or considering sentence structure)
• Confirm: use one or more pieces of information, from the text, to make sure reading is correct
• Self-correct: errors, using information from the text or story
• Make predictions
• Read fluently, with phrasing
• Prompts for taking guided reading groups / students

Tips for guided reading 

• Insist on students reading one to one (one written word for every spoken one), but as discourage finger pointing as soon as students demonstrate consistency with this. 
• Teach students about words, spaces, letters, sounds, first, second, middle, last. Tasks to assist with this: cut up sentences, rearranging the words in a sentence, noticing letter sounds (first, middle etc), letter/word sorting. 
• Use positive forecasting/prompting that encourages recall, e.g. "you know this word, we read it yesterday, say the first sounds....ok now, write it on the board/paper etc
• Limit verbal instructions - 'you try' is enough, often

Observing a colleague to learn new strategies (observation of Lisa Griffiths, in Reading Recovery). From this, I learnt that it is best to: 

• Stop a child when they were making errors, so they have a  clear understanding of correct reading behaviours
• Give clear direction e.g. “put your on the word you said. You said ‘in.’ Put your finger on ‘in’."
• Use  redirection e.g. “go back and fix that, “ and “what’s that sound?” pointing to the page, you said want and there is no w there.”
• Use praise – e.g. “good noticing and fixing those words”.
• Reaffirm child’s existing knowledge e.g., “what’s that sound? We did that letter sound yesterday.” 

·       Several times, Lisa supported the child to check and self correct, e.g. “that is the same word as this word, which you said before. What is the word?”, and “fix that letter so it is around the right way” (when writing).