St Benedict’s C of E VA Junior School Governor monitoring report
Monitoring focus: Accelerated Reader, a diagnostic computer reading programme Date and description of monitoring activity: May 8th 2019. Piers Ranger, Head teacher and Sue Wootton met to discuss the Accelerated Reading Programme that is used throughout the school. This Reading programme was introduced into St Ben’s between 2015 –2016 and is used for all Year Groups. It is intended to be used in St John’s Infant school for Year 2 and assessed when they enter St Ben’s at Year 3. This Reading Programme provides the staff with very detailed and comprehensive information about the Reading Ability, Reading level, understanding of text, the amount of books read by each child and how much time each child spends on reading. In general it is managed by TA’s. 1. Each child will be on a Book level. 2. Once the child has read the book, a quiz is undertaken to see if the child has understood the context of the book. 3. A certain percentage of answers are needed to be correct for the child to continue with more books. The number of questions will depend on the book level. 4. After success at their starting level the child will progress through different levels. As different levels of books can be located throughout the school it makes it easier for a child of any reading ability to choose their appropriate level of book. The children have opportunities both in school and at home to read a variety of books. As the programme informs staff of the amount of books read by individual children it enables staff to send a letter to the parents if not enough reading is being done at home. As this is a standardised programme all children will be assessed with their understanding of text by the same questions. This is an extremely valuable part of the programme so that staff can see if a child is finding information difficult to process or just speed reading to complete a book. Piers has observed through this programme that there has been a noticeable improvement in reading, a better comprehension of text and the children appear more engaged in the skill of reading for pleasure which will hopefully become a life skill. Sue Wootton had the pleasure of meeting one girl from Year 4, 5 and 6 and two boys from Year 4. All the children present were reading a variety of fiction depending on their personal choice. Each child has a Reading Record book. Stickers are earned with the amount of books read, generally 4 times a week and they were very proud of the number they had achieved. They enjoyed the ability to gain points and receive small prizes for their efforts which were rewarded in Collective Worship. As most children love competitions the Reading Programme enables a word count of each class to be recorded. Thus Year Groups can compete for the highest words count once they have passed their quiz. This group of children enjoyed this aspect of the programme and rose to the challenge. Questions arising (3-6): 1. As long as TA’s are available to analyse the data and inform class teachers of the information this is an excellent reading programme. 2. Time is needed to sort out books into the appropriate reading level and put a coloured sticker on each book to identify the level. 3. It was pointed out by a Year 4 girl who was reading Part 1 of an author she obviously liked but didn’t know if the school had Part 2 so she may be unable to continue the series. 4. Perhaps there could be some method of alerting staff to this through the Reading Record and allowing children to access the local library for more books by the same author.