Teaching Reading: A Sequence To Ensure Whole Text Comprehension
- Aidan Severs
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
I've noticed an uptick in people downloading Year 6 SATs resources, and if your thoughts are turning to KS2 SATs then you might want to have a little explore of the resources I've got available to help you and your pupils: https://www.aidansevers.com/the-sats-collection
Seeing the folk downloading these resources puts me in mind of a recent conversation with a former colleague who told me that the 6 lesson sequence we developed is still being used successfully in my last school, so I thought I'd share that with you here, as I don't think I've ever blogged about it.
Although structure and routine doesn't always work - sometimes you have to make a decision to break out of it based on the children's needs - we followed this outline, allocating 3 reading lessons per week:
Let's unpack that a bit, by exploring some of the individual elements:
Reciprocal Reading:
Sessions followed the cycle of all 4 stages, with all children taking on each stage of the cycle: Predicting – clarifying – questioning – summarising
A class summary wall/book was used to track the class reader. We got in the habit of summarising what we'd read every time we read and added it on a post-it note to the wall. This helped children track back through what they had read and helped to embed the strategy of summarising for comprehension.
Fluency reading:
A session particularly dedicated to fluency in reading/reading aloud. This was flexible, but usually involved children having chance to read the text aloud (to a partner or a group).
Reading aloud was modelled by the teacher, with discussion centred around tone, punctuation, emphasis etc (based on each year group’s reading objectives). Children listened to a teacher reading text and then had the chance to read the text themselves.
Reading Roles:
Now this is something I have blogged about, so you can read to your heart's content about them here: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/reading-roles-teaching-metacognitive-reading-comprehension-strategies & https://www.aidansevers.com/post/reading-roles-based-on-research-backed-reading-strategies
In short, a memorable job role is assigned to each of the reading comprehension strategies (some of which are linked to the 'domains' that children are tested on in the SATs) to help children to remember which strategies they can use when reading and comprehending a text. Many schools have found these very useful.
You can download the Reading Roles resources here: https://www.aidansevers.com/product-page/reading-roles-resources
If you'd like to find out a bit more about this, you can contact me and we can discuss how to make it work in your school.
And if you're currently thinking about how to teach reading in your school, you can check out all of my writings on the subject here: https://www.aidansevers.com/blog/categories/reading
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