Parents and carers from St. Bernadette’s RCPS engaged in an active learning reading session on Thursday 26th February. Pupils from across the stages participated in the session sharing their knowledge and understanding of reading skills and strategies with both parents and visitors from St. Ninian’s Primary School in Stirling.

Falkirk Council’s Literacy team delivered the session sharing the good practice embedded in the school and two P6 pupils confidently and competently delivered a short presentation which included a very impressive i-movie and musical rap demonstrating reading skills.

Parents took part in a thinking reader session using the text ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  The strategies and key ideas to support children at home were shared and explained.

The six strategies are:

1) Prior knowledge and understanding

2) Metalinguistics

3) Visualisation

4) Inference

5) Main ideas

6) Summarising.

The visitors were then treated to a marketplace style tour of pupil work from across the stages.

Feedback included:

• This was enjoyable, fun, great insight into children’s learning. It’s amazing to have the evidence exhibited in children…. Amazing
• Good to show how the kids learn and the wide variety of text. Learned how important the kids understanding the text is and understanding of words.
• Very informative so impressed by the work of the pupils. Fab!
• The session was very helpful. Helps me understand more about how reading is taught and delivered in school! Will use at home.
• Very useful allowed insight into strategies employed within school (would be helpful having “bullet point” newsletter on this.
• I really enjoyed this session. I find it incredible and inspiring to realise the skills the children are managing to acquire at such a young age.
• Reading is a wonderful life skill so anything that encourages it is a great idea.
• I found the session helpful in relation to encouraging reading skills to my grandson. Maybe an information night for grandparents/carers would be beneficial.
• Really good to see such creative children that seem to really enjoy what they are doing.