Jen has shared the following advice about how we can make even better use of our ERIC time every morning:
Since I began teaching the Literacy Plus unit with some of our weakest year 7 students, I have been made aware of just how much some struggle with the reading and understanding of basic, phonetic words. Even as an English teacher, I wasn’t really aware of what a reading age of 5/6/7 actually meant in terms of what it looked like on the page.
ERIC is a great way of getting these students involved and interesting in reading, as well as helping to bring on their reading ability. To help ensure that they are making the most of their reading time, you might want to consider trying some of these basic points:
- Go around and listen to a few pupils read aloud to you. You might be surprised how good, or otherwise, they are as well as assessing, to an extent, their ability to access the texts that you’re using in the lesson.
- For the last few minutes of ERIC, get pupils to share what they’ve read with a partner and comment on what was good and bad.
- At the end of reading time, have a few key questions ready, not to catch them out but rather to encourage and promote books. Use the 5 Ws- who, what, why, where, when and how.
LRC Bev is currently in the process of ‘stickering’ all of the books in the LRC with reading ages so look out for this and maybe try to steer pupils towards choosing material that is suitable for them; I often find that stronger readers choose books that are not at all challenging!
