Whole Class Reading - Support for All
As educators, we consistently challenge our pupils in all areas of the curriculum. With high expectations, varied teaching strategies and plenty of positive reinforcement we ensure all children in our classes make good progress. However, some of our pupils need a bit more support than others. In this article Primary English Associate Gemma Spence considers a range of approaches to ensure that children across the ability range are supported and provided for during whole class reading lessons.
There are many advantages to delivering reading lessons to the whole class. For example, pupil engagement and productivity can be increased as all pupils receive the attention of the expert in the room (you) for the full lesson; you can build on children’s knowledge and understanding by linking the texts you use to the wider curriculum, you can make ambitious text choices so that the whole class is exposed to age-appropriate texts, and by involving the whole class you have the potential for wider discussions than if teaching children in small groups. But just as there are advantages to teaching the whole class together, so there are also some common challenges. For example, when the texts are ambitious, how do you ensure that all children in the class are able to access them and engage in the learning? And, when you have confident and sophisticated readers in the class, how can you be sure that you’re not holding them back whilst you support other readers, or over-relying on them to provide the responses to your questions? How then, can you differentiate when teaching Whole Class (Guided) Reading?
Pre-teach vocabulary
There’s no escaping the importance of vocabulary for understanding what you read. And with this in mind, some of your children may benefit from having vocabulary pre-taught to them before the main reading session. During planning identify the vocabulary that the children would benefit from learning (we recommend using the tiered approach to vocabulary learning from Beck et al), and then explicitly teach the meanings of those words. Don’t be afraid to be a directive teacher who gives children the definitions (it’s a far more effective approach than asking them to second-guess the meaning of words they don’t know). And do define the words in ‘child speak’ before launching into those oh-so-difficult dictionary definitions. A favourite approach of mine is to add a pictorial representation of the word and display it in the classroom – which is particularly useful if your school is keen for you to use Dual Coding as a means to improving children’s knowledge.
If you’re looking for more vocabulary teaching ideas, take a look at the following Primary English articles.
Playing with words (part deux)
Vivacious Vocabulary: books to support playful vocabulary learning
Prior reading
For children who are still developing their decoding skills, reading the text prior to the lesson is incredibly supportive. Children can read it themselves at their own pace, have the excerpt/ chapter read to them by an adult or read as a small group or pair to tackle the text in a safe and scaffolded environment. Moving this way from teacher reading, to paired or grouped to individual reading is easy to implement and is a really good way to ensure that text is reread but also that the children’s confidence is built upon as you remove each layer of scaffolding. By reading aloud to children you can feel assured that you will not only be helping them with their decoding but also be aiding their comprehension beyond their usual reading ability thanks to your fluent and expressive reading.
Visual learning
It is so important to be able to visualise what we are reading to aid our comprehension and understanding of the text. However, some readers are unable to do this and there are even children in some classes who think it’s cheating! To support visualising, focus on descriptive language and encourage the children to draw what they are reading. This might be a setting description, character description or a particular scene. Children retrieve the evidence from the text during this task and make comparisons in the outcomes with a partner. This task really focusses the children’s minds on the words in the text that trigger their visualisations and so supports them to consider the effectiveness of authors’ choices at the word and sentence levels.
Often, the mental images we create when reading are based on our prior knowledge and experiences. Of course, we can never provide children with all the prior experiences they will need to accompany all the texts they read, but we can build a bank of images and encourage children to make connections based upon these. One way is to use artefacts such as old coats, shoes and bags, and to speculate about who they may belong to, why you might think this and the reasons that lead you to make these inferences. Whilst you’re making inferences based on these artefacts, you’re also storing the images away to illustrate future visualisations and influence later inference making.
Reading to and with children
Whole class reading should not just be reading aloud to the children and asking questions. By combining a range of reading strategies in lessons, all children will be able to participate whilst improving their fluency, pace and understanding. Earlier in this article I talked about choral reading, paired reading and individual reading as approaches to scaffold children’s reading in pre-reading sessions. Whole class reading is the perfect home for using these techniques. Not just as methods for keeping everyone active and engaged (it must be said they are excellent for this), but as a systematic and robust approach for teaching fluency skills. And if you were ever in any doubt that it’s worth teaching fluency, even in Upper Key Stage 2, then do get a copy of the Megabook of Fluency where the excellent Tim Rasinski outlines a whole range of approaches including copy reading which will ensure your children learn to copy the expression you use in order to understand texts at a deeper level.
Independent activities
Whole class reading sessions should involve activities for the children to complete independently to demonstrate their understanding of the reading skills taught. There is nothing in ‘the whole class guided reading rule book’ that says all the children need to do the same independent activities at the same time. When planning your whole class reading lessons, take the time to think about which activities to use at key points to extend, consolidate or support different readers. It may be that you want everyone to complete the same activity but that you need to modify the task to enable all children to access and excel whilst still meeting the same learning objective. Alternatively, you could plan for a group of readers to work with you on a supported task whilst your set the rest of the class off to answer questions about the text or to collect evidence telling them more about the main character, for example. Likewise, you may want to extend a group of confident readers with challenging questioning and analysis and so you devise a task that the rest of the class can complete independently of you (and remember independently doesn’t need to mean on their own). As in all lessons, whole class reading offers you the opportunity to use learning activities to scaffold, support, extend and challenge all within a framework of closed and open-ended responses; the differentiation you would provide in other curriculum lessons.
Thinking out loud
An important role for the adult in whole class reading lessons is to model learning. Like modelling a mathematical method for long multiplication or how to use the active and passive voice in writing, children learn from seeing and hearing. Verbally modelling thoughts whilst reading will support and challenge readers but also show them the mental processes that we employ as we read. Because, when we read, we are constantly questioning, predicting, making links to our own lives and other texts we’ve encountered and drawing conclusions to support our understanding of the text. Children need to be shown how to do this – and as I said earlier, some of them even need permission to do this as they think it’s cheating to use knowledge from outside the text. Using statements to show your thoughts as you are reading aloud, for example, I wonder why…, I know…, I remember…, I think… will support children to predict, infer meaning and make connections across the text and between other texts the children have read.
Whole Class (Guided) Reading has much to offer children and teachers alike. It enables teachers to work directly with the whole class at the same time, it cuts down on the volume of independent activities required when using a traditional guided reading approach and it enables all children in the class to experience texts pitched at their age-group. However, the wide range of reading abilities in most classes mean that the approach doesn’t always meet the needs of all pupils all of the time. By taking time to plan and prepare for all children, by being clear about the skills being taught and a determination that no child will be left behind, the approaches shared in this article should help you include all children in your differentiated whole class (guided) reading lessons.
Want to find out more about our Whole Class Reading Teaching Sequences? Just click below.
Gemma Spence is our KS1 expert. In addition to working with Primary English, she is an English Subject Leader, Assistant Headteacher and KS1 teacher.