The Braes Cluster Literacy Working Group have been working to  develop a shared language with regards to reading comprehension across all associated schools. Part of our development work in the 2016/17 academic year involved the implementation of a transition task to be started by P7 pupils in their feeder primaries and then utilised during S1 transition visits to support critical essay writing.

The chosen text was a short story titled ‘The New Boy’, by Geddes Thomson. The children read this text in their P7 classes but the ending was not revealed until their two day visit to Braes High School. They arrived to the English Department to see their poster tasks, with annotations to reflect the six comprehension strategies for reading, displayed in the corridor. Their English lessons were then focussed upon transforming their character visualisations and inferences into a critical essay.

Positive feedback from staff and pupils upon completion of this project has encouraged our working group to devise a similar activity for May 2018 – potentially using poetry or song lyrics as the stimulus for analysis. Watch this space for further updates!