Introduction This book is a guide and resource bank for teachers who want to spice up their strategies for teaching guided and whole-class reading in primary schools. It provides tips and advice for the effective teaching of reading in your classroom, as well as a set of photocopiable activities that can be adapted to suit whichever text you are studying with your class. The activities support the teaching of the key reading skills of retrieval, inference, summarising, understanding vocabulary, prediction, commentating and authorial intent. They aim to teach children techniques to answer questions and understand these different skills within reading comprehension. Comprehension itself comes from children having broad knowledge and vocabulary. Whilst the reading lesson will help to develop these skills of comprehension, it is important to look at the bigger picture. Comprehension is more likely to improve if children are actively discussing books, developing their understanding of the world around them through an engaging curriculum, and expanding their vocabulary. Comprehension is gained from a wider reading experience and, as teachers, we are the role models for this. Whilst it is still important to practise exam-style questions, this should not be the exclusive focus of reading lessons. The activities in this book provide a different way of developing and applying the key reading skills through guided reading and whole-class reading. Guided reading and whole-class reading are important approaches in helping pupils to truly explore texts. The deep conversations they facilitate are pivotal to children’s development as readers. Guided and whole-class reading sessions are the perfect opportunity for teachers to help children develop the skills of retrieval, inference, summarising, understanding vocabulary, prediction, commentating and discussing authorial intent. In these focused sessions, children read a specific fiction or non-fiction text appropriate to their reading age and work on a particular skill by answering questions or completing tasks based on the text. Both guided and whole-class reading have the same purpose, aims and intended outcomes, but can often work in different ways. In this book, when I refer to ‘guided reading’, I am referring to the traditional ‘carousel’ approach to guided reading, whereby a class is separated into smaller groups with each group working on a specific text and differentiated task. The ‘carousel’ approach is the most common example of guided reading in practice across primary schools. Nevertheless, different methods can work for different teachers and there is certainly no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Guided reading doesn’t have to look the same in every classroom. When I use the term ‘whole-class reading’, I refer to the approach whereby all children in the class are given the same core text and asked to practise a specific reading skill. I will explore the distinctions between guided reading and whole-class reading in more detail in Chapter 1. Because of the different methods involved, some teachers consider guided and whole-class reading as two different sides of the same coin. However, it’s important to dispel this myth. In fact, we shouldn’t completely segregate the two approaches, as an effective reading lesson can have elements of both. A whole-class reading lesson can have elements of guided reading within it and vice versa. For example, the teacher could focus on one group after input, whilst everybody else continues with the same activity. The differentiation could be through adult support, whilst some children could even have a different task associated with the same text. Here we can see whole-class reading in action with elements of guided reading intertwined. In practice, your school will most likely favour either the carousel guided reading model or whole-class reading and if you are a classroom teacher, you will generally need to follow the approach that is preferred in your setting. The good news is that the activities in this book are suitable for both carousel guided reading and whole-class reading sessions, so you can use them no matter which approach your school favours. If you are the English lead in your school, you may wish to think again about which approach works best for your pupils and teachers. As you read this book and use the activities, it’s important to remember that while mastering the seven key reading skills is essential to children’s overall attainment, not just in English but also in subjects across the curriculum, there is so much more to teaching reading in primary schools. Primary teachers have a responsibility to nurture a love of reading, encourage reading for pleasure and help reluctant readers to discover the magic of books. Reading really needs to weave its way through a school’s curriculum and be part of your school’s ethos. Successful reading schools will take much pride in engaging readers in different ways and guided and whole-class reading lessons should only be one stop on this route. The activities in this book have been carefully selected to create a reading ‘buzz’ in your classroom and appeal to the more resistant reader. It is my hope that they will enable your carousel guided reading and whole-class reading sessions not just to focus on skill development but also to nurture an excitement for reading among the children in your class.
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