Overview of a Balanced Reading Programme

Last week Panmure Bridge School and Glen Taylor School had a fantastic professional development TOD lead by Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey. We explored and unpacked the modelled, shared, guided and independent reading approaches, with lots of great practical ideas shared that I am excited to introduce into to my reading program. Here is the link to my notes.

Some of the key ideas we explored:

• Explicit teaching of reading is important at all levels
• Summary, main ideas, evaluate, justify, connections, synthesising
• Must be teaching reading across the curriculum
• Becoming a proficient reader means decoding, self monitoring, critical thinking, evaluating
• Self monitoring means knowing what words mean, decoding and making meaning
• It is not ok to not understand
• Give a picture of the word to help students make connections and move to making meaning not simply decoding without understanding
• Think, talk, elaborate
• We read to students to:

• Encourage opportunities to focus and notice vocab, language or key points
• Gift the time to think about the complexities of a text - comprehension
• Modelling think alouds - what fluent reader do to make meaning
• Develop a passion for reading
• Give information
• How words join together

My Takeaways:

                                             

(Images from The Literacy Place presentation)

• Introduce 'tricky words'
• Encourage students to use sticky arrows to find the example or evidence or identify tricky words
• Introduce post its as ‘stoppers’ to avoid reading ahead in guided sessions
• Y7/8 need attention to prefix and suffix - use white boards to add suffixes and prefixes to build words from a root word (find these in the comp. book)
• Think/pair/share...think/pair/record
• Shared Reading: 
• Teacher models reading but students must be able to see the text (words)
• Exposes students to a variety of texts (their reading diet is limited due to skill level being limited)
• Encourage students to build on from each other's ideas by saying “I’d like to add to that because...”

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