Tag: reading

Closing the Gap

Closing the gap 1

Falkirk Council: Closing the Gap

A number of Falkirk Council schools are in the first phase of a Partnership Project that is funded by Education Scotland’s School Improvement Partnership Programmes (SIPP).

The SIPP is a collaborative school improvement strategy that promotes new ways of working across classroom, school and local authorities. Data and collaborative enquiry are used to innovate, test and refine new approaches to tackle the attainment gap.

Falkirk Council is currently one of 7 local authorities funded to work with the Robert Owen Centre, University of Glasgow. Projects across authorities are wide ranging and are very different but the main focus of each is to use collaboration and enquiry to tackle educational inequity and ‘Close the Gap’ for pupils.

Falkirk Council’s identified task is to pilot a staged intervention approach to low attainment in literacy in the upper primary, involving the building of family capacity in areas of relative deprivation.

This is an exciting joint initiative between Schools and Community Learning and Development. Seven primary schools within Falkirk and Grangemouth clusters have signed up for the project. These schools are using a systematic literacy intervention programme called High Five (Family Fischer trust) with small groups of pupils in P7 who have attained lower literacy scores. Alongside this, the Community Learning and Development team are providing additional opportunities for the pupils and their families to encourage motivation and ambition. Opportunities for enhanced transition to High School are also being explored.

The literacy intervention programme will run for a minimum of 20 weeks. Some parents have engaged with the process and have signed up for additional CLD activities.

Robust quantitative and qualitative data is being gathered and will be presented to SIPP, and pupil progress will be tracked from P7-S2.

So far, pupils are enjoying their experiences using age appropriate strategies and structured reading materials.

Closing the gap 3

Active Literacy – A Probationer’s Story

farmer duckAlix Thomson, a P3 Probationer teacher at Victoria Primary is delighted to share her experiences implementing active reading in her class. Here is Alix’s story:

This term my P3 class, at Victoria Primary, have been working on developing their comprehension skills, with a particular focus on summarising. The lessons have been successful and the pupils have really developed their skills, so I thought that I would share them with you as you said to send on anything that was working well.

The class began developing their summarising skills by focussing on key words. They used key words in lots of different ways.

  • Picking out key words in reading books: choosing the most important word on each page and explaining why; covering up words to see if they were essential for understanding the sentence.
  • Using different forms of text to further our understanding of the importance of key words: using shop catalogues as their text, pupils had to pick key words to describe an item to a partner without using the name of the product – could their partner work out what they had chosen?; watching or listening to news stories and noting down the key words.
  • The class also started including key words in our Busy Starts: key words from a well known story or film were displayed on the smartboard and pupils had to work out which book or film it was; this then progressed into pupils setting challenges for classmates – what film were their key words describing?

Then pupils developed their understanding by using key words to help them to summarise texts.

  • Note taking: whilst watching a short video clip of our class book (Farmer Duck), we took notes on a whiteboard, trying only to note down key words; these notes helped us to create storyboards summarising the story.
  • One sentence summaries: pupils had to write a sentence to describe their reading book; this skill was then used throughout all curricular areas with pupils using one sentence summaries to describe any of our lessons, or to recap on learning during a lesson.

Literacy Strategy Celebration of Success

Monday 12th January saw over 100 people attending a celebration of Falkirk Council’s Literacy Strategy event at Camelon Education Centre. Representatives from all of the 8 work streams including parents, pupils from Bonnybridge Primary and Grangemouth High School, teachers, Education Scotland, Library Resource Services,  businesses, partners, Falkirk Herald, Forth Valley College, the author Stuart Reid, librarians, development officers from neighbouring authorities, Scottish Book Trust, Employment and Training Unit, Moneywise Project, Entrepreneur Me and Renella.

Key note speakers Helen Fairlie, Literacy Development Officer, Education Scotland and Anne Pearson, Acting Director of Education started the celebration event off with positive news about how Falkirk Council are raising attainment in literacy.

After hearing the key note speakers, participants broke off into work stream groups to engage in professional dialogue and share their contributions to the literacy strategy to date. They then examined next steps and further ways forward to support ‘zero tolerance to illiteracy’.

Here are a few samples of photographs from the event:

IMG_3640 IMG_3641 IMG_3642 IMG_3643 IMG_3645 IMG_3647 IMG_3649 IMG_3651 IMG_3653 IMG_3655 IMG_3658 IMG_3659 IMG_3662 IMG_3664 IMG_3665 IMG_3671 IMG_3672 IMG_3674

Active Approaches to Reading at Early Level

P1010085

Falkirk Council’s Early Level literacy mobilisation team have been working hard on support materials for Early Level staff. The focus is on early reading skills and the team have produced a short document outlining approaches to support the teaching of early reading skills. The document provides examples and photographs of ‘The Thinking Reader’ in action at this level. Sharon has been working with a number of nurseries including Larbert Day Nursery, Denny Primary School Nursery, Hallglen Nursery, St. Margaret’s Nursery and Nethermains using this approach. St. Francis RCPS have taken the Thinking Reader approach which is embedded across the school and adapted it within their nursery. St. Francis have produced wonderful work included in a ‘Thinking Reader’ floorbook which they are sharing at a good practice literacy event across the authority.

To access this document, please click here: Active Approaches to Reading Dec 2014

Thinking Reader at Bainsford Primary

 

Emma Cuthbert, Interim PT at Bainsford Primary School is delighted to share the wonderful work her P2/1 class has been carrying out in relation to higher order reading skills. 

The class have already studied Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers and completed a thinker reader booklet. The start of this session has been spent on Book Detective skills and roles and comprehension related to their reading books.

They have recently studied Pink – again by Oliver Jeffers and you can see some evidence of their hard work here.

Emma and her class are making an extremely valuable contribution to the Literacy Strategy and plans to go onto applying these skills to other texts. Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer is really impressed with the quality of reading here and has invited Emma to share this good practice at an authority CPD event.

Can you spot the 6 comprehension strategies in operation here?

1. Prior knowledge and understanding – what do you already know about penguins? What do you know about pink?

2. Metalinguistics – can you spot the tricky words or phrases? Can you find the word ‘penguin’ in the text?

3. Visualisers – can you draw of a picture of the story so far?

4. Inference – reading between the lines questions

5. Main ideas

6. Summarising

The children really enjoy the Thinking Reader approach and here are a few quotes to share:

“I really enjoyed ‘finding the evidence’ in the book” Ella

“Can we do these again for a different story? They are fun.” Jack

Embedding Reading Strategies Across Bonnybridge Primary School

Bonnybridge Primary School have been working really hard to embed active literacy  across their school. In this post, we are taking a look at how Bonnybridge are improving attainment in reading. In active literacy reading, there are 6 comprehension strategies which are:

1. Prior knowledge and understanding – what do the pupils already know about the text/ main theme/ author

2. Metalinguistics – what are the interesting words and phrases? Which words do you like? Which words are you unsure of? How can we check the meaning?

Here the pupils are using a range of strategies, but you can see how they are analysing the words and phrases in this online newspaper report and using a dictionary to support their understanding. The pupils are using an active reading approach called ‘The Thinking Reader’ here:

3. Visualisation – can you produce a visual image in your head of the story/ plot/ character? Younger pupils will record this as a picture or drawing. Older children will produce more complex mind maps/ diagrams.

4. Inference – reading between the lines – what is the message the author is trying to convey without actually saying? What is the difference between what the character is thinking and what the character is saying?

Look at this wonderful work showing results of applying their inference skills about an advert #widertext 

5. Main ideas – what are the main ideas relating to plot/ character/ setting/ themes? Here we can see the pupils from P6/7 of Bonnybridge Primary School using their knowledge of the main ideas to formulate a theory of their own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFdMGginz4Y&feature=youtu.be

    6. Summarising and paraphrasing – can you summarise the text in less than 20 words? Can you summarise in a tweet? Can you paraphrase the story? Can you provide synonyms and antonyms?

Look at these wonderful summaries of Danny, Champion of the World:

All of these 6 comprehension strategies combined are a very powerful toolkit for pupils who are then required to apply across a range of curricular areas in a range of new and unfamiliar situations.

Here is a quote from the Head Teacher commenting on the impact of active literacy across her school:

“A greater understanding and confidence by staff in delivering literacy across the school. Engagement of staff in the use of media to enhance learning and teaching is much more evident. This in turn has developed a deeper understanding for pupils of their learning.” – Jill Stocks, Headteacher

What does the DHT say about active literacy?

“This session, part of my remit is to develop Literacy and English across the school. We have worked hard as a staff to implement the principles behind Active Literacy. I find that reading has moved significantly away from ‘hearing reading’ to ‘teaching reading.’ At all stages in the school, the children are actively involved in their learning, working with the six comprehension strategies to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the texts that they are reading, watching or listening to. The use of Blooms Fans in the upper stages has encouraged deeper thinking and questioning of texts. A wide variety of learning contexts to which the children can apply their comprehension strategies has helped the children to transfer their reading skills across the curriculum.  In addition to reading, writing has improved with the implementation of the genre specific targets in Taught Writing, Core Writing Targets in Taught Writing, Daily Writing and Writing Across The Curriculum jotters. Some classes have also introduced Personal Writing Targets where children are encouraged to set their own areas for improvement. The contexts for writing are relevant, purposeful, enjoyable and link directly to IDL themes where appropriate.” – Andrew Watson – DHT

Here is a quote from one of the class teachers:

“I have seen a vast improvement in Literacy over the past year. The implementation of spelling strategies have enabled the children to meet core targets within everyday literacy tasks. The children learn to spell actively which allows the words to come alive and while there is still very much a place for writing / spelling the words correctly, this has allowed the children to embed their learning,

The comprehension strategies are firmly implemented within all reading tasks. The children are fully aware of what each strategy is and how each strategy helps them  to progress their learning and fully understand any text, whether it is a novel, film or a tweet. The children are more engaged with their literacy and are not only improving in literacy but are very much focussed on doing so.”- Michelle Cairns Class Teacher

“There has been a definite improvement in the literacy skills of the children over the past term.  The children are much more engaged in their learning and I feel they have gained confidence in their own abilities. Over the past year the children have developed a more secure understanding of the 6 comprehension strategies and are much more confident using these independently.  The inferencing skills in particular of the children in my class have improved and they are now more able to show a deeper understanding of the text as well as recognise and include inferencing  within their own writing.  My class really enjoy using a variety of texts such as film clips, articles etc and I feel that because of this the quality of discussion has significantly improved.” P6 Class teacher Emma Stanners

“Both myself and my class have learned a lot through active literacy this session. It has been a delight to provide a context for active learning and then to watch as the children take the initiative with their own learning.

The six comprehension strategies help to make reading more interesting for the children. They gain a deeper understanding of their texts and, consequently, enjoy it more. I have had parents come and tell me about how surprised they were that their child has suddenly developed an enthusiasm for reading at home and I believe active literacy played a huge role in this.

Similarly, I have been able to see many children develop and interest in their writing this session through active literacy. Much of our writing has linked to practical activities that we engage in prior to putting pencil to paper and so the children have been actively thinking about their task before even writing about it. As a result, they are eager to write.” Class teacher P6/7 Sarah Burns

What about the pupils? What do they have to say about active literacy? Here is a sample from P3K:

“Reading is different this year because we’ve got chapter books, with harder words. In Primary 2, we didn’t do inference, but now we do. I like reading because it’s quite fun and I like finding the clues. Inferencing is my favourite thing because we find everything”  – Lucy MacFarlane P3K

 “I like reading because it’s fun to do. I like doing summarising because it can be hard to find all the main points. It’s fun because you get to see good books like Boy Racer and you can read about who wins and who’s not good and who sticks up for them. It’s basically just fun!” – Zaak Budzinski

“I like reading because you get to learn loads of stuff from the books. I like doing main ideas. Sometimes it’s really hard, sometimes it’s really easy.” – Laura Little P3K Matthew Morrison P3K

“Prior Knowledge is everything that’s already inside your head. You use it so you can read.” – Ellie Wyatt P3K

“I like reading because you learn new things and you get harder words now. The book is longer too.” – Rory Bateman

Active Reading Animation for Parents and Carers

As part of Falkirk Council’s ‘Zero Tolerance to Illiteracy’ strategy, the Curriculum Support Team have been working on a number of ways to support parents and carers in this area. It is very important to us to share the strategies used to teach reading with parents and carers in order to improve attainment in this area. Reading workshops have been delivered a number of Falkirk Council Primary Schools and these have been really well received with really positive feedback.

A short animation has been recorded to support in this area and is available on Falkirk Council’s You Tube channel. We are very grateful to a P7 pupil from Airth Primary for recording the voiceover on this, showing us her excellent reading skills in action! It can also be accessed from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef1zKq6zm3U

For more information, please contact your child’s school to see if they are holding an active literacy reading workshop.

Active Literacy Update Session 2013 – 2014

 

Each year, as part of Workstream 6 of the Literacy Strategy, a report is prepared relating to Workstream 1 – ‘Embed active literacy in every establishment’.  These reports can be viewed here:

Please click this link to access Active Literacy Strategy July 2013 for Session 2012 – 2013.

Please click this link Active Literacy Strategy July 2014 to access ‘Active Literacy Update’ for Session 2013 – 2014.

For further information, please contact literacy@falkirk.gov.uk

The Thinking Reader – What do the pupils think?

 

Pupils from St. Bernadette’s R.C.P.S. in Falkirk have demonstrated their knowledge and understanding of the six reading comprehension strategies at a recent C.P.D. event. The two P7 pupils eloquently described each of the strategies and treated the audience to both an i-movie trailer of a book they have been studying and a rap.

The audience included a range of teachers, including Education Scotland and the Literacy Development Officer from Highland Council who said “The two P7 children from the school were excellent. It highlighted to me that the years of training they’ve had in developing their Higher Order Thinking Skills has allowed them to apply their knowledge, understanding and skills across the curriculum – a real treasure.”

 The audience really enjoyed the presentation and later went onto Twitter to tweet:

Here are some extracts from the presentation, prepared by the pupils:

Primary One Literacy Assessment and Action Resource

 

Primary One Literacy Assessment & Action Resource (POLAAR)

The Primary One Literacy Assessment & Action Resource, aimed at helping P1 teachers and support staff to identify learners at risk of developing later difficulties with their reading and writing, is now published on the Education Scotland website.  The resource was developed collaboratively by educational psychology professional bodies, the Scottish Government and Education Scotland and is based on research commissioned by the Scottish Government and undertaken by Professor Keith Topping on the key factors which underpin successful literacy development in learners.  POLAAR meets a commitment made in the SG’s Literacy Action Plan to encourage all local authorities to introduce personalised (literacy) assessments and diagnosis at P1, and to encourage practitioners to be aware of and act on this assessment information.

Click here to access Literacy Appraisal and Action in the Early Years summary document.