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Month: January 2023

Part One: Meaning making: a complex process

Part One: Meaning making: a complex process

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As Scarborough’s well-known reading rope image illustrates, reading with meaning is a multifaceted process. Readers who read with a deep level of meaning habitually select the right reading strand or use them simultaneously to orchestrate an overall understanding through continually building and updating their own mental model. However, I believe that in addition to the reading rope complexities, comprehension relies heavily on the specifics of the text being read: the background knowledge for that particular text; the vocabulary in that…

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Part Two: Lingering for success – Get the Gist, Get to Grips and Go Solo!

Part Two: Lingering for success – Get the Gist, Get to Grips and Go Solo!

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Expert readers rely heavily on the effective mental model they build whilst reading, often using multiple reading strategies to build it as they read. However, even experts have to stop and remind themselves of what they have read – to shuffle the author’s intent into their existing mental model. If an expert needs to stop and reread then a novice certainly does. Yet do we allow children time to linger over the texts? To reread and build effective images to…

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Part three: Get the gist – mental model building

Part three: Get the gist – mental model building

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As educators, the moment we engage in modelling, we have to see it as a chance to do something really powerful for our students. We have a chance to leave them with an expert model; a chance to make the abstract concrete and support their conceptual understanding of a complex process. [5. Pg 40 & 41] There is no doubt that reading comprehension is a highly complex process so of course high-quality modelling will sit right at the forefront of…

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Part Four – Fluency: What’s all the fuss about?

Part Four – Fluency: What’s all the fuss about?

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Research clearly indicates fluency is a critical component in skilled reading so therefore it should be a regular feature in our reading instruction, but is it? I mention, more than once, in part three of my blog series, choral reading, echo reading partner reads etc. Why are these activities so prevalent? Because they simply yet effectively allow children to practice the skill of reading fluently – a skill which has been described by many as the bridge between decoding and…

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Part Five: Get to Grips – purposeful book talk

Part Five: Get to Grips – purposeful book talk

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It is the reading itself and the related discussion that will most advance children’s ability to read. [4. Pg 132]   Previous blog posts have outlined how the act of reading can quite clearly advance children’s ability to read so this part will focus on the discussion and why high quality, interspersed discussion is essential when supporting children towards independently reading with meaning. The discussion is key and needs to be thoughtfully prepared; just reading the text aloud is not…

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