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A 3:05 video that explains simply how to apply the reading strategy of summarising - this is especially important for support groups

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Main Idea | Summarising | Reading Strategies

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through discussing

Key questions to ask for clarification:

What do you think about this scene/moment?

Do you agree that this moment is important? Why or why not?

What do you think the writer is trying to teach us here?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you like/dislike about this character?

STANDARD AND STRETCH
Student questioning within pairs

Students to write (on paper/mini whiteboards) any questions they have about the text as they are reading.

Pause after a selected amount of reading (e.g. end of each page/two pages) to allow students to ask their partner their questions

Teacher to circulate class and monitor engagement

Teacher to choose a pair to share a question and answer

Optional (good for SEND)

Have oracy sentence starters printed or on screen

Dual coding (on board or printed)

Model what to do before they do paired questioning

Chunk instructions and check for understanding

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through inferring

Key questions/sentence stems to use for inferring:

I think this could mean…

Perhaps the character feels…

Because of this event, the novel is now…

Because of this word, the character us now…

What is the author hinting here?

STANDARD
Comprehension through discussing

Key questions to ask for clarification:

What do you think about this scene/moment?

Do you agree that this moment is important? Why or why not?

What do you think the writer is trying to teach us here?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you like/dislike about this character?

STRETCH
Comprehension through predicting

Key questions to ask for predicting:

Did I expect this would happen?

How will this scene affect the story?

Does the writer tell us everything here>

What do you think will happen next?

How does this link to earlier chapters?

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ALL GROUPS

On completion of a book, students complete a book review. This allows for extended discussion and reflection on what they have read, their thoughts and their complete understanding of the text.

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through clarification

Key questions to ask for clarification:

When the character says this, what does this mean?

What does this word mean?

What does this scene teach us?

Is this an important moment? Why?

STANDARD
Comprehension through connecting

Key questions to ask for clarification:

Hows does this scene link to earlier chapters/moments?

Hows does this moment change the novel?

How has the character changed?

How does this book relate to society today?

How does this book link to others I’ve read

STRETCH
Comprehension through discussing

Key questions to ask for clarification:

What do you think about this scene/moment?

Do you agree that this moment is important? Why or why not?

What do you think the writer is trying to teach us here?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you like/dislike about this character?

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through summarising
Students summarise the meaning of sections of the text to consolidate and elaborate on their understanding.

Chunk text

After each chunk, ask students to tell you what happened in that section

Check for understanding of any higher level words in that section

Slow the pace of reading to allow for more conversation

STANDARD
Comprehension through clarification

Key questions to ask for clarification:

When the character says this, what does this mean?

What does this word mean?

What does this scene teach us?

Is this an important moment? Why?

STRETCH
Use of reading flashcards

Use flashcards within paired/small group reading to extend student questioning and conversations around text.

Use under the visualiser  (or photocopy) until laminated copies are available

Students to use in pairs/small groups

Teacher to circulate to monitor their use and help direct students to an appropriate card

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How To Teach Students to Ask Questions When They Read

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How To Teach Students to Ask Questions When They Read

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This is an excellent resource that can be applied to reading groups and within the classroom. Focuses specifically on how to introduce student-led questioning during a reading task.

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Reading Comprehension Strategy Series: How To Teach Students to Ask Questions When They Read — THE CLASSROOM NOOK

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Questioning is a reading strategy that is taught to students to help them to better engage with the text. It helps the reader to clarify what he or she is reading and to better understand the text. Asking good questions is a way for students to monitor their own comprehension while reading.

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A 4.16 minute video that is beneficial for staff and to share with students. I recommend watching with students so they can utilise this reading strategy in other subject areas.

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#8 How to Make Inferences While You Read (Reading Comprehension)

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A 3.51 minute video that is beneficial for staff and to share with students. I recommend watching with students so they can utilise this reading strategy in other subject areas.

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#2 Prereading: How to Make Predictions (Foundations of Reading Comprehension)

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Research and an 8 minute video outlining what discussion is and how it can help students gain deeper understanding of the concepts and ideas.

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SERP | Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate - CCDD

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What do we mean by discussion and debate?

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A very informative video where they discuss the metacognitive strategy of making connections for reading comprehension. This can be applied for both Guided Reading and subject areas. 4.30 minute video.

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Please show and use the strategies in this video with your students to aide in reading clarification and monitoring of comprehension. Video is 4.48minutes

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#5 Clarify and Monitor Book with Context Clues (Reading Comprehension)

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A 4:47 video that outlines simply the concept of clarification and how to apply this while reading.

This would be an excellent tool to use WITH students at the beginning of the week (especially good for stretch groups to actively encourage them to independently use strategy)

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#5 Clarify and Monitor Book with Context Clues (Reading Comprehension)

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through summarising
Students summarise the meaning of sections of the text to consolidate and elaborate on their understanding.

This supports the monitoring of their comprehension.

Summaries can be verbal or written.

Model the thought process to allow students to see how to apply this strategy (e.g. I know the character did (x) first, before they then did (x))

STANDARD + STRETCH
Comprehension through clarification

Students identify areas they are uncertain about – perhaps individual words or phrases. They then seek information to clarify meaning.

Clarifying meaning could be done by:

Re-reading more slowly.

Looking carefully at any pictures present with the text.

Consulting a dictionary.

Using prior knowledge to think about how this could link to the text.

Reflecting on the text read so far.

Thinking hard about what the writer is trying to say.

Model the thought process to allow students to see how to apply this strategy (e.g. I know the character did (action), so this must mean they are feeling (emotion)

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ALL GROUPS

Dual Coding

1. Pre-read sections of text and identify key vocabulary or ideas

2. Match vocabulary or ideas to pictures or visual stimuli to support student understanding

3. Use and refer to pictures while reading to aid student comprehension

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SUPPORT
Comprehension through questioning
1. Cold-call students to check for their comprehension of the text*
2. Build in questions so they become more challenging for more able readers (e.g. if they demonstrate good comprehension, ask them to predict what will happen based on their understanding of the character or situation)

*Use the book one-pager to help pre-plan and formulate questions

STANDARD + STRETCH
Paired Reading

1. Teacher to put students into pairs (more able with less able readers - use SAS scores to help with this)

2. Students to read aloud in pairs a selected chunk of text together

3. Teacher to be circulating room/monitoring to ensure all students are reading together

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A more in depth look (6min 40sec) at the science behind Dual Coding. This is really effective in understanding the theory and how we may be able to apply to our lessons

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Dual Coding - Learning Science in the Classroom

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A very short video about what Dual Coding is

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What is Dual Coding? How Combining Words and Pictures Helps Boost Memory

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A five minute read focusing on the benefits of Paired Reading. This gives details on the research basis and the strategy in practice - very informative and instructional for reading leaders.

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A short video and information about the benefits of using a reading ruler. Although this is targeted at students with dyslexia, this approach is very beneficial for all students with lower reading ages and abilities.

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Dyslexia is a learning disorder that makes it difficult to read, write, and spell. People with dyslexia often have difficulty decoding words, following the text line, and staying focused on the task at hand. There are a variety of interventions that can help people with dyslexia improve their reading skills, including dyslexia rulers.
What is a dyslexia ruler?
A dyslexia ruler is a transparent ruler that is placed over text that a person is reading. The ruler has a narrow slit in the middle, which allows the person to focus on one line of text at a time. The rest of the ruler blocks out the surrounding text, reducing distractions.
How does a dyslexia ruler work?
The dyslexia ruler works by helping the person to focus on one line of text at a time. This can be helpful for people with dyslexia because it reduces the amount of visual information that they need to process. The ruler also helps to block out distractions, which can further improve focus.
Benefits of using a dyslexia ruler
There are a number of benefits to using a dyslexia ruler, including:

Improved reading comprehension

Reduced eye strain

Increased focus and concentration

Reduced distractions

Increased confidence in reading

Dyslexia rulers are a simple and effective way to improve reading skills for people with dyslexia. If you or someone you know is struggling with dyslexia, a dyslexia ruler may be a helpful tool.

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Dyslexia Ruler Reading Aid: A Simple and Effective Way to Improve Reading Skills - OrbRom Center

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Dyslexia is a learning disorder that makes it difficult to read, write, and spell. People with dyslexia often have difficulty decoding words, following the text line, and staying focused on the task at hand. There are a variety of interventions that can help people with dyslexia improve their reading skills, including dyslexia rulers.

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Reading Fluency - strategies for teacher-led reading

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Reading Fluency - strategies for teacher-led reading

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A five minute read with insight into why teacher-led reading to model reading fluency can be so impactful. Suggestions on other strategies to use (echo reading, choral reading, etc) that may be useful to consider.

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Do you have students sitting in your high school class who struggle to read fluently? Sure. We all do. The problem is that most teaching programs do not prepare secondary teachers to address this issue. How can educators focus on improving reading fluency issues in middle and high school? The answer is not black and white, but certain approaches can help.

It's important to emphasize that issues with reading fluency typically originate early on in students' lives. Many secondary students with fluency problems were not exposed to literacy-rich environments as infants, toddlers, and elementary students. High school teachers should not feel like they need to address fluency issues in addition to the rest of their already demanding curriculum.

Besides, poor fluency is not a dilemma that can be rectified with a few mini-lessons. It's also important to note that it's really not necessary to address fluency in the regular education classroom if it doesn't impede students' comprehension. Instead, teachers should recommend students who struggle with fluency for intervention services. If your school has a reading or literacy specialist or an RTI team, fill them in on your observations.

Still, some secondary institutes don't have the luxury of employing specialists. So, what can teachers do in their classrooms to support students who struggle with fluency? What advice can we offer parents so that they can also work with their children at home?

CHOOSE APPROPRIATE TEXTS

When students have difficulty reading words out loud, it's likely a vocabulary issue, or the reader is focusing more on the individual words than on trying to comprehend while reading. If you notice a student consistently struggles with fluency, try a text with an easier reading level. When students don't have to work so hard on vocabulary, they can focus more on understanding.

The movement to include more choice reading in the secondary classroom should help teachers to match students with books that are appropriate to their independent reading ability. When teaching whole-class novels, stories, or articles, consider using sites like Rewordify to simplify complex passages. Online sites like Actively Learn, Scholastic Scope, and NewsELA also differentiate text levels for the same article.

When I teach Shakespeare in my co-taught classes, we only read short excerpts of the original play. For the majority of the study, we read adapted texts and supplement with the movie to provide the visual scaffolding many struggling readers need. If your school does not separate students into ability tracks, I strongly suggest making an adapted version of the text available to struggling readers.

READ TO STUDENTS

When teachers read out loud to students (or use audiotapes), students benefit from hearing what fluent reading sounds like. Many struggling readers weren't read to outside of school as children, putting them at a disadvantage. While high school teachers cannot - POOF! - miraculously catch up a student who reads at a third grade level, we can make a difference by showing them the habits of good readers.

As teachers read out loud or play an audio tape, we can pause and model what to do when confronting difficult vocabulary. We can show students how we read a sentence differently by noting punctuation marks. Teachers can show students that readers tend to speed up the pace during suspenseful parts of the story and slow down during descriptive passages. We can show students how to use their finger to swipe under entire word groups to read them fluently instead of pointing at words as separate units.

Think about what good readers do without even being cognizant. Those are the tips we need to share with struggling readers as we read out loud.

I'll never forget the times I've read texts to struggling readers. Mythology stories to my freshmen. Lord of the Flies to my seniors. Simply by modeling intonation, feeling, and fluency, my students are immediately drawn into these texts - captivated.

READ WITH STUDENTS

When trying to improve fluency, teachers can use different strategies during whole-class read alouds. During each of these strategies, remember that modeling multiple times might be necessary, and it's important that students can see the text as they read. Use a document camera, or simply have students follow along in their own copy of the book.

Echo reading. The teacher reads a sentence and model appropriate tone, pace, and volume. Students echo your example.

Choral reading. Everyone reads together. Students will naturally fall in line with the group.

Repeated reading. Have students read a short text out loud over and over ( I wouldn't recommend using more than a paragraph). As they gain more confidence with the vocabulary and sentence structure, they will be practicing reading more fluently.

Phrased reading. Helping students to focus on complete phrases instead of individual words can improve fluency. My favorite way to do this is by pointing out how sentences are structured grammatically. Teachers can show students how an introductory prepositional or participial phrase is used to improve the flow of a sentence. Likewise, teachers can explain how dependent clauses function as a unit to lead into a main clause.

REDUCE THE PRESSURE

Readers theater. Allowing students the freedom to read out loud creatively and without concern for accuracy gives them a safe space to practice fluency. It's fun to model how to read lines and then tell students just to have fun reading...not to stop and toil over a word if they think they mispronounced it. Just keep going!

One of my most successful units teaching struggling readers is when we create our own script of the ending of Romeo and Juliet and act it out. At-risk students love it, and it allows them the context to practice fluency in a memorable, effective way. Not sure what it is? Read more about readers theater.

Partner up. Sometimes students are reluctant to read in front of their peers. It's easy enough to assign two students to a role. Both teens read the same lines at the same time, which takes the pressure off of individual kids.

Don't surprise struggling readers. Unexpectedly calling on struggling readers to read out loud can be traumatizing for students with fluency issues. Teens can be judgmental. Always give students a heads up when asking them to read out loud, or allow them to decline your invitation.

It's been proven that phonics instruction is not effective at the high school level. Rather than focusing on breaking down word parts, reading to and reading with teenagers is most effective at improving reading fluency problems. When possible, get help from specialists and intervention teams. Using a few of these strategies in the classroom can help to provide the interventions students need.

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Improving Reading Fluency in High School - Reading and Writing Haven

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Trying to improve reading fluency in high school can be frustrating. Here are some effective approaches educators can use in the classroom.

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An article that outlines some of the science on how people learn how to read.

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Learning to read is a complex process involving multiple skills and knowledge. Read about the challenges children face as they learn how sounds are connected to print, as they develop fluency and learn to construct meaning from print.

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A four minute video visually outlining the science behind learning to read.

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The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

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Lots of links, videos and resources to support and develop reading for students and understanding of reading for teachers.

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Term 1 - Week 8
SUPPORT
Establishing Routines - reading rulers
1 . All students and teacher to have a reading ruler

2. Teacher to model how to use reading ruler

3. Students and teacher to use reading ruler while reading

*Please ensure you re-collect rulers at the end of each session - they need to stay in the book box

STANDARD + STRETCH
Students to read aloud

1. Students read out loud (either to whole class or in small groups/pairs)

2. Teacher to be circulating room/monitoring to ensure all students are reading along and actively listening

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Term 1 - Week 5 and 6
Comprehension through questioning
1. Cold-call students to check for their comprehension of the text*
2. Build in questions so they become more challenging for more able readers (e.g. if they demonstrate good comprehension, ask them to predict what will happen based on their understanding of the character or situation)

*Use the book one-pager to help pre-plan and formulate questions

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Term 1 - Week 3 and 4
Establishing Routines:
- teachers to read out loud to model reading fluency and pronunciation
- teacher to be circulating room/monitoring group to ensure all students are reading along and actively listening

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Some great examples of the different types of questions you can ask while reading a text with students.

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Research of phonics teaching by EEF.

Phonics is an approach to teaching some aspects of literacy, by developing pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the relationship between written symbols and sounds.

Teaching of phonics is especially useful for teachers of Support reading groups and for students who have low reading ages and abilities.

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Phonics approaches aim to quickly develop pupils' word recognition and spelling through developing pupils' ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes (the smallest unit of spoken language), and to teach them the relationship between phonemes and the graphemes (written letters or combinations of letters) that represent them. Successfully implementing a phonics might involve:

Using a systematic approach that explicitly teaches pupils a comprehensive set of letter-sound relationships through an organised sequence

Training staff to ensure they have the necessary linguistic knowledge and understanding

Carefully monitoring progress to ensure that phonics programmes are responsive and provide extra support where necessary

Carefully consider any adaptions to systematic programmes that might reduce impact

Good implementation of phonics programmes will also consider pupils wider reading skills and will identify where pupils are struggling with aspects of reading other than decoding that might be targeted through other approaches such as the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies.

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Phonics is an approach that develops pupils' knowledge of the relationship between written symbols and sounds.

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An example of how to effectively use chunking and summarising. This can be adapted to suit any subject context.

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Here, the teachers have employed several reading strategies to help support students in their class. AS you watch, consider what strategies they have used, the impact these have had on their students and how you might be able to incorpate some of these into your own practice.

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DIT Labs - Fairfax County Public Schools

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Best Practices: High School Reading Strategies

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A 3 minute video that discusses a wide range of strategies specifically for teaching vocabulary. This is relevant for all subject areas and reading groups.

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Chunking is an important part of reading. Breaking a text down into visible chunks (e.g. separating the page of a book into quarters and pausing after each quarter to discuss); separating pieces of information within a text; grouping ideas or recognising patterns are all good ways at allowing students to process information without becoming mentally overloaded.

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Chunking: Learning Technique for Better Memory

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These are some questions students can ask themselves (or others) while they read a text to better comprehend and analyse what they are reading.

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Before, During and After Reading Comprehension Strategies

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Before, During and After Reading Comprehension Strategies

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A 5 minute video that focuses on before, during and after reading comprehension strategies. Very useful for use within the classroom, regardless of subject.

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Reading Comprehension Strategies in the Classroom

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A 3 minute video outlining some key reading strategies aimed at improving reading comprehension.

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EEF’s Sarah Green explains the significance of developing pupils’ reading fluency and how this can feature in teaching.

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EEF blog: Shining a spotlight on reading fluency

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EEF’s Sarah Green explains the significance of developing pupils’ reading fluency and how this can feature in teaching.

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Tier 2 key words typically found within exam papers. Although specified as AQA, these words are relevant to all exam boards.

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Based on the seven recommendations of improving literacy, this is a valuable tool that can be used both on an individual basis and as a whole school.

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Actively teaching reading fluency to struggling pupils can be beneficial. This tool offers practical classroom examples to support developing pupils’ reading fluency.

This offers examples from Early Years to KS3.

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Ten key literacy terms and definitions to support with your understanding.

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Reading fluency can be defined as reading with accuracy, automaticity and prosody. When pupils read fluently, their cognitive resources can be redirected from focusing on decoding and onto comprehending a text. For this reason, fluency is sometimes described as a bridge from word recognition to comprehension.

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This offers a simple view of reading and how it can be broken down into the different parts of reading.

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Robust strategies for teaching vocabulary and modelling language use in the classroom (adapted from Beck & McKeown).

Use these techniques as part of teacher modelling, explanation, and pupil practice to support your vocabulary teaching.

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Term 1 - Week 1 and 2
Establishing Routines:
- all students collect a copy of the book as they enter
- all students open on the same page and reading along

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This guidance report offers insight and strategies into targeting literacy and how it should be addressed and improved across the curriculum

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Disciplinary literacy is an approach to improving literacy across the curriculum. It recognises that literacy skills are both general and subject specific, emphasising the value of supporting teachers in every subject to teach students how to read, write and communicate effectively in their subjects.

Here, are seven recommendations from the EEF. It emphasises seven recommendations on how disciplinary literacy can be embedded.

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Reading Across the Curriculum - Padlet Purpose

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Reading Across the Curriculum - Padlet Purpose

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Reading and literacy are the foundation of all subjects across BACA. The aim of this page is to provide you with CPD, strategies and support in embedding a culture of reading and literacy within your classrooms and students.