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Along with being a primary school teacher and leader, blogging is where this all started for Aidan. If it wasn't for his passion for writing and sharing his learning and experiences, he wouldn't be working as an education consultant with schools across the country today. Shared best practice should be available to all and here on the Aidan Severs Consulting blog you can get ideas for making a difference in your own school. The blog is also a great place to learn exactly the kind of work that Aidan can partner with your school on.
Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies
What is (or are) Reading Roles? Reading Roles is a resource designed to aid children’s metacognition when reading. Metacognition can be defined simply as ‘thinking about thinking’. Reading Roles takes familiar job titles and assigns them to reading strategies and skills thus giving children an easy-to-refer-to system for being more deliberate with their thinking during reading, with the ultimate goal of being able to comprehend texts. Most children will already understand wh
Aidan Severs
Jan 306 min read
Reading Roles Based on Research-Backed Reading Strategies
Explore effective Reading Strategies to enhance comprehension in students.
Aidan Severs
Jan 306 min read
Reading Roles Generic Reading Activity Exemplified
In my blog post Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies I mentioned a generic activity which can be used with any text. Here's that activity in full: The aim of this activity is to help children gain a better understanding of a text. It focuses on using 5 of the main widely-acknowledged reading strategies. Although the activity itself has a goal of enabling understanding of one text, the cumulative effect of doing several of these activities is
Aidan Severs
Jan 3010 min read
Reading Roles: The Philosopher Role and Answering Philosophical Questions About Texts
In my blog post Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies I mentioned the Philosopher role. Here's some more information about that Reading Role: Philosopher – thinking Asking and answering philosophical questions about a text allows children to engage further with what they have read. Doing this has the potential to improve comprehension for the same reasons as we have discussed under other Reading Roles: the deliberate act of thinking about wha
Aidan Severs
Jan 302 min read
Teaching Reading: Boosting Background Knowledge To Aid Inference-Making
A few years ago, the author Tom Palmer sent me a copy of his latest book Wings: Typhoon. It's a great read aimed at 8 to 10 year olds and is a stereotype-breaking brew of the supernatural, football, fighter jets and the relationship between two sisters. But before I knew all of that I was intrigued to find that the covers of the book extend to contain a cut-out-and-make Typhoon aeroplane model. Is this a gimmick, or is there something more to it? One of the complaints about s
Aidan Severs
Nov 22, 20247 min read
SATs 2025: Answering 3-Mark Reading SATs Questions - An Update
Since I last wrote about helping children to answer 3-mark questions , the way those questions are asked has changed. Whilst much of the advice given in the previous blog post still stands (indeed I will be referring to it a lot in this one), it needs a little update. As part of this update, I have expanded the matching resource which can be downloaded here : Let's have a look at the 6 (2 per test) 3-mark questions from the 2022, 2023 and 2024 papers : 2024: 3-Mark Reading Qu
Aidan Severs
Nov 5, 20245 min read
The Best RE Lesson I Ever Taught (Spoiler: It Was A Reading Lesson)
It was the last day of half term: business as usual. I always started the day off with a reading 'session' (somehow can't bring myself to call it a lesson) and that Friday was no exception. Continuing with our reading of Sandi Toksvig's 'Hitler's Canary' and with a focus on linking non-fiction with fiction, I had prepared a text about Judaism. The strategy focus that lesson was scanning the text for answers. The children underlined what they thought would be key words in the
Aidan Severs
Jul 23, 20244 min read
Misguided Reading (6 Questions To Ask When Planning A Reading 'Lesson')
How should we teach reading? What do we even mean by 'reading'? Decoding? Comprehension? Both? Is it more than that? Scarborough's Reading Rope, as shared by the EEF on X (https://x.com/EducEndowFoundn/status/1235657088430493697?s=20) Scarborough's Reading Rope breaks things down a little more and, if nothing else, serves to show that there is quite a lot going on when one picks up a book to read. If the above 8 headings (background knowledge; vocabulary; language structures
Aidan Severs
Mar 19, 20246 min read
5 Ways To Help Children To Access The KS2 Reading SATs
Not many year 6 teachers want to spend months going through past papers, and indeed, many past papers now don't match the rigour and complexity of the more recent tests. There's also a growing (and welcome) trend of moving away from reading lessons being death by comprehension questions which require a written answer and are organised by the SATs reading domains. But, it's never a bad idea to help children to feel like the tests are familiar, and there are some things about t
Aidan Severs
Jan 5, 20243 min read
Teaching Reading: Pairing Non-Fiction with Fiction
Matching fiction texts to non-fiction texts helps children to understand both texts better. This oost uses a case study to exemplify this.
Aidan Severs
Feb 25, 20224 min read
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