Managing Reading in an Active Learning Classroom! February 29, 2008
Posted by jmacaulay in : Active Learning, Classroom Management, Classroom Organisation, Resources , trackback
At the workshop on Monday evening, some practitioners were looking for support in teaching reading in an active classroom. It was clear that no-one has yet found the ideal, but for many of us, the best way to inform our own practice is to share (and pinch) ideas which we can make our own. Please feel free to take anything from my experiences that you think might be useful, or use the comments section to share some of your own work. For most of us, all help is gratefully received!
Like every Infant Teacher, reading groups were the thorn in my side!
This is my story of how I have begun to find a way of managing reading in my classroom as I moved towards Active Learning. I appreciate that this is not a solution for all, and that the way I work won’t suit everyone’s context, but it might just stop someone out there banging their head against a brick wall!
With a class of 24 typically energetic and lively five year olds, I was finding it increasingly difficult to “do” two reading groups every day plus individuals. It’s a scenario I’m sure everyone is familiar with - the maths took a bit longer than I thought, it took us ten minutes to find the missing pair of trousers after gym, there are only fifteen minutes left until lunch - and I haven’t heard the Snails do their reading yet! Something has to give!
I began to think really hard about what I could do - this included pestering every teacher I know in the profession in the hope that someone out there had an answer - no such luck! However, one thing was very clear to me - I could not teach all the things I needed to about punctuation, vocabulary, keywords, comprehension, de-coding, tallying, recognition of sounds….you get the idea …..in the space of fifteen minutes. And there is a limit to how many times you can listen to “Kipper at School” without feeling slightly mad. Was I teaching the children or simply hearing them? (Meanwhile keeping an eye on who was at the toilet, how much glitter one girl could put on a cereal packet and if the child who found self- motivation a challenge had managed to do anything.) I knew in my heart that these children infront of me were not learning, merely performing.
Alongside my stress with reading, I had been experimenting with and developing formative assessment strategies as part of my work on the Learning Team with Shirley Clarke. My teaching had been turned on it’s head, and I was doing a lot more class teaching, with built in differentiation, so that I could find time within lessons to give quality feedback to the children about their work. Could I do this with reading too?
I realise that this will not be rocket science to a lot of you, but to me it was a revelation!
We had a Scholastic Book Fair in school at the time, and I just happened to find the catalogue. (My head teacher usually hides these things from me, for the same reasons that my partner confiscates the Next Directory.) Imagine my delight when I found a resource called “Shared Texts” - pieces of text which can be used with the whole class with, wait for it, ideas for teaching activities at the side!
Off I went! To keep myself right, I began to make notes on what I was going to teach - lesson plans. There was also another reason for this. In order to ensure that I was including Formative Assessment strategies into my teaching, I used the lessons plans to indicate the learning intention, success criteria, where I was going to use talking partners, what kind of questions I was going to ask and so forth. I won’t deny that this was a lot of work, but it was worth it. My teaching was focused, well planned and, crucially, it helped me to reflect on my teaching to identify next steps. It also ticked the box for the learning log that I had to keep for Shirley Clarke.
So what did a typical lesson look like?
I’m afraid you’ll need to wait for this bit because I have to go back to school and get my log, but I promise to finish this as soon as I can (after Trinny and Suzannah.)
So……
This is a lesson I used with a new P1 class this year on the 13th September - not long into the session. In fact, the second whole class reading lesson I’d done with them.
Rather than use a text from the Scholastic resource, I made up my own text about a soft toy fox we have in the classroom. Roger the Fox helps with a whole manner of things, from missing your mummy to a bump on the head. I found that the childrens’ experiences of reading were still fairly limited, and I needed to tailor the text to suit the sounds and keywords we’d covered so far.
Roger’s Party
It was Roger’s birthday. He was five. Roger was a very excited fox. He was going to have a party. Roger wanted all his friends to come. He wanted a cake and he wanted to play Pass the Parcel. There was a knock at the door. Roger went to see who it was. It was Billy Goat Gruff. Billy Goat Gruff had brought a present for Roger. It was a……
Lesson Plan
Share Learning Intention with the children:
We are learning to read a piece of text
Learning Activities
* Read through text with the children, encouraging them to join in with any words they knew. The text was up on the board and I used my finger to follow the text as we read.
* Flashcards for sets of keywords (ORT) stage 1 and some words from stage 2. I used the flashcards to look carefully at the words - “How do you know that word says and?”
* Played “Bingo” with keywords. The games were differentiated in the following way:
Children were put into their reading groups (arranged by ability)
Bingo cards matched the keywords that the groups were working on that week
* Read over text again. I read from the text on the board. The children sat with their Talking Partners to read from copies of the story which had already been glued into their reading jotters. The children took turn to use castanets to identify keywords they recognised as we read together while their partner looked on and helped.
* ADDED SUCCESS CRITERIA TO THE DISPLAY ON THE BOARD
Look for clues: * read the keywords you know
* Think and wink! (This is wait time or thinking time in our class. The children are invited to “have a think and give me a wink.” At the beginning of the term, I had to train the children not to put their hand up. We managed this with some success, but the children still wanted a way to signal to me that they were ready. I didn’t want a signal that would be distracting to children who were still thinking, so we came up with this idea. It is also very amusing watching children wink from my side!)
was - referred to the “silly sentence” we had used earlier in the week to help us remember how to build the word “was” - wolves are stinky. The children had made pictures to match their sentences which were displayed on the wall for the children to use as a reference.
” Think and wink” - how can we remember how to build this word?
Can you write this on your whiteboard? Talking partners checked and helped where necessary.
* CHALLENGE! - on your text, can you highlight 8 words that say “was“? (The children love this activity - great excitement when the highlighters come out!)
* ADDED SUCCESS CRITERIA TO THE DISPLAY ON THE BOARD
Look for clues: * read the keywords you know
*remember the silly sentence - wolves are stinky
* Modelling - a good and bad example
Roger was a fox
Roger saw a fox
With Talking Partners, which word says was ?- Prove it!
* Word building- use magnetic letters to build the word was, then saw. What did we notice?
* ADDED SUCCESS CRITERIA TO THE DISPLAY ON THE BOARD
Look for clues: * read the keywords you know
*remember the silly sentence - wolves are stinky
* look at the first sound in the word
In order to get the most out of the piece of text, I always make sure that I have some sentence work in the whole class reading lesson.
* Think and Wink - Why does Roger have a capital R at the beginning?
( In our class, we use a green pen to write a capital letter and a red pen to mark punctuation. The colour coding is great for highlighting punctuation and is very visual.)
* Children were then asked to find 3 words that said “Roger” in the text and give each one a green capital letter. (To keep thinks moving, as soon as the children are finished the task, they come to the board and take turns to repeat the activity on the class text. I have found that by the time this is completed, most children have finished and have joined us. It also helps the children who are unsure as they can check their work against the board. As well as this, “dead time” on the carpet is avoided.
* Talking Partners - “Tell me about these sentences:”
He was five
he was five.
He was five.
This activity helped to reinforce work we had already undertaken about a sentence and how we know it is a sentence.
* Use a green capital letter pen and red full stop pen to mark a sentence in the text. I modelled two sentences on the board before the children were sent off to do this. As the children worked, it was fairly easy to pick out the children who could do this independently and those who needed direction from the board. I was then able to challenge thinking by asking some children to find another sentence…and another!
* Put a pink circle around another sentence that begins with “He.”
* Keywords challenge! Children were given differentiated lists of keywords to find/highlight in their piece of text. To add a bit of excitement, we used a five minute timer. Again, the children were invited to find the words on the class text when they were finished.
Snails Bees Butterflies Ladybirds
wanted the and a
have It the and
went to to the
* Prediction - Think and wink - What do you think the present was? Shared ideas with Talking Partner, then Talking Partner reported idea back to the class, encouraging children to listen to each other. Five minutes to draw Roger’s present in their reading jotters. I then chose five children to tell me 2 things about their idea.
* Time to read! This was probably the most stressful part of the lesson and really put myself to the test! As the children were practising to read the text, I went around the children individually and identified a part of the text that I wanted them to be able to read. I used all the observations I noted during the lesson to help me decide what the children were capable of, as well as my knowlegdge of where the children were in terms of keywords and reading books. This is where it is crucial that you know your children! However, the more reading lessons like this that I’ve done, I get to know the children better. I used a “Special” reading pen ( pink highlighter that flashes!) to put a box around the text each child was to read. For some children, I simply highlighted a sentence or two. For others, I highlighted the whole text.
The children were then given time to share their reading with their Talking Partner, then I invited four children to read their passage to the class.
* Plenary
We went back to look at the Learning Intention, and the children were asked to select a “Tickled Pink Cube” or “Green for Growth Cube” from the basket to indicate “Did you achieve the Learning Intention?” The children then divided into groups and considered how this could be made easier or more challenging the next time.
” It could be longer.”
” It could just have tallying words”
“It could have all the words that I know”
This gave me something to think about for the next lesson!
This method of teaching has turned my practise upsidesdown, and it ticks all the boxes for Active Learning! One thing I have noticed is that although I often use texts from the Scholastic resource, I very rarely use the suggested activities because I have to tailor what we do to the needs and current interets of the children - but they’re great for ideas.
If you can take anything from my experience, please do - and don’t forget to leave a comment and let everyone know how you got on!
Comments»
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It is great to see Roger looking so well after all these years!
A class mascot like Roger is a great stimulus for reading and writing - I’m talking from personal (pupil) experience!
This is one of the best junior reading lessons I have ever seen! I would love to use your example in my own practice - and was very amused to read your introductory comments re managing reading groups etc, as that’s exactly how I feel about my own present programme. Hope you have time to answer a few questions I’m wondering about…How long did this particular lesson take you to prepare? How long did it go for in the classroom? Have subsequent lessons been successful? Do students take the text home? Can you explain your ‘talking partners” system or provide a link to info about this. Probably too many Q’s I know
but am really keen to give your eg a whirl. Cheers.
I am also glad to see Roger is still alive! He certainly was an important part in childrens’learning even in the 80’s.
I have referred a few of my colleagues to this article as I thought it was fantastic! The infant department in the school are now using the strategies involved, particularly like the visual representation using the colour code for the punctuation, the results speak for themselves!
Great ideas
Fab lesson love the tickled pink cube idea