7 April 2021

WoW – sufficient CPD Focus – Embedding Reading Warriors, Developing Voice Confidence

READING	WRITING	ORACY
Reading widely Reading for pleasure	Spelling of subject-specific vocabulary Use of WAGOLLs to model/scaffold (visualisers, mini-whiteboards)	Purposeful and structured communication with others

THIS WEEK

Welcome back!

T&L Update – please read/listen to the update from RLO here. It shows the direction of travel for the next term and summarises staff, student and parent voice for the last term.
CPD Focus – continues to focus on reading. All staff should work to embed Reading Warriors (resources are saved here) and the Reading Quick Wins approaches (here) where possible.
PTSA - trainee is now full time, Monday to Friday until the end of June.
Trainee/new staff induction CPD this week – CPD will resume next week with JMA delivering on SEND (details TBC).
IMPORTANT: Setting work – please ensure that work is uploaded, as per department approach (i.e. Class Materials or Assignments), for every lesson so that isolating students can complete.
Homework – Middle leaders’ homework strategy discussed with SLT links this week.

REFLECT

Feedback - Plan - Teach

Link to this term’s CPD focus – Embedding Reading Warriors, developing voice confidence

Key Priorities

Embedding Reading Warriors when appropriate
Giving students to opportunity to use their voices within your lessons (whether reading their work or from a text)
Promoting wider reading within your subjects and reading for pleasure

The half-termly review of teaching and learning – involving collating staff, student and parent voice – highlighted the positive efforts of teaching staff to explicitly teach reading skills, especially in terms of tier 2 and 2 vocabulary. Importantly, the data also showed that half of staff had already tried to embed the Reading Warriors model (Walton le Dale’s slant on reciprocal reading) at least once within their lessons within this first few weeks of face-to-face teaching. There is a way to go, but this is a step in the right direction to making Walton le Dale learners interrogative independent readers.

However, the data collated also corroborated the post-lockdown teacher’s hunch that learners had lost their classroom voices. 49% of the students who completed the survey (69 in total) do not feel confident enough to read their work aloud to the class (it is worth bearing in mind that this was a new question asked and therefore cannot be compared with previous data).

In our efforts to ease students back into their learning, let us also allow them the time and space to find their classroom voices and their confidence (whether this is by reading their own work or from a text). Small steps are what is needed and the following tips may help:

Reading Round Robin (RRR) - students read orally from a common text, one child after another, while the other students follow along in their copies of the text.
Popcorn Reading: A student reads orally for a time, and then calls out “popcorn” before selecting another student in class to read.
Combat Reading: A student nominates a classmate to read in an attempt to catch the peer off task, explain
Lolly Stick Reading: Student names are written on lolly sticks and placed in a cup. The learner whose name is drawn reads next.
Touch Go Reading: As described by Somme, the instructor taps a child when it’s his or her turn to read (not practical at present).
Students in control – allow students to read as much or as little as they wish.
Choral Reading: The teacher and class read a passage aloud together, which minimizes struggling readers’ public exposure.
Partner Reading: Two-person student teams alternate reading aloud, switching each time there’s a new paragraph. Or they can read each section at the same time.