Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery is a programme designed to help those children who find learning to read difficult overcome those early reading barriers.
The programme is aimed at children in Year 1 aged between 5 years 9 months – 6 years 3 months. Each programme lasts between 12-20 weeks and consists of a half hour lesson each day.
The lessons are a balance of reading and writing and tailored to the needs of the individual child. Although lessons have common factors each lesson is different because each child and their needs are different.
The lessons aim to accelerate the progress of children’s reading in order that they can begin to enjoy reading and writing with a degree of competency within the class.
Children are encouraged to read as much as possible outside the lesson and are given a new book every day which they are asked to read at home. The books chosen by the teacher are designed to help reinforce and consolidate what is being taught in the lesson. Obviously the more the children read the more they can understand how to read and comprehend what they are reading.
Children are given a variety of books both fiction and non-fiction and great care is taken to ensure that books given are enjoyed and pitched at the correct level. Books are a mixture of mainly ‘real’ books with the occasional book from our phonic reading scheme. All children are encouraged to read the book each night and return it the following day, this is a vital part of the programme. The children who do this are the ones who successfully complete the programme.
All activities within each lesson are designed to encourage the children to work independently and to engage in solving problems. The levels of the text used are raised cautiously in order to provide extensive practice on texts at the next level. Children are encouraged to be flexible and to try a variety of approaches to a text but within a fail-safe situation. Children therefore are encouraged to succeed and do so.
Once a child has completed the programme their progress in reading will continue to be tracked to ensure progress is maintained and improved upon further.
ReadWriteA2Z
ReadWriteA2Z was introduced two years ago in order to address some problems with Reception children. It was felt that some of the children needed a short term intervention to help close some of the gaps with others in the class. The main foci of the intervention are:
- Reading to the children a short text and showing them how to point to individual words.
- Talking to them about the pictures and the story.
- Encouraging them to talk about the book with the teacher and one another.
- To practice saying a featured sentence in order to secure it in their heads.
- Read the featured sentence with the children again.
- Talk about how the writing and the picture on the featured page match.
- Giving the children time to read the book quietly by themselves.
- Demonstrate how to write the featured sentence highlighting HFW.
- Talk about where the sentence starts and begin demonstrating how to write individual letters and words.
Using a whiteboard show how to write and rewrite words until they become more familiar. Difficult words are written in for them.
Model how to place the full stop.
- Finally they have a cut up sentence to work on and this and the reading book go home.
By the end of the sessions all children are more able to:
- Handle a book and confidently turn the pages beginning at the start to the end.
- More able to form letters correctly.
- Familiar with the terms ‘capital letter’, ‘full stop’ and ‘sentence’.
- Able to confidently read their book and talk about the story.
- Eager to show others their book both at home and in class knowing that they could read and talk about it well.
- Feeling a huge sense of achievement and pride in their reading and writing.
All reading books are Level 1 Pink Band and children stay at that level throughout the programme. All either continue to read at that level but with a variety of books from different publishers or moved up to Red Band.
