Reading course with a Reading Recovery Tutor

This year I have attended three day courses with Joan. She is the far north Reading Recovery Teacher Tutor. We went to Shirley Tuisini's office at Kaitaia Primary and had three great sessions on teaching juniors about literacy. This was an excellent opportunity to review my current practice in regards to taking SEA, 6 year nets, running records. We also discussed ideas for writing, shared reading and guided reading.

A question posed to me by Diane my principal is "How can my students demonstrate the success criteria." Joan proposed a two day guided reading session where on the second day we focus on the follow up of the read from the day before. So if my focus is on "noticing the endings on words" then we will have a follow up activity that is specific for this learning. We also discussed using the buddies who come in from another class to ask the students "What are the strategies you are learning at the moment?" This initially had a great response after their teacher worked with them on discussing strategies.

There were quite a few takeaways from this course. Here are a couple I can think of at the moment:

-Reading recovery teachers work on two focus questions. She said everyone knows there is more learning occurring but they always have these focus questions.

-If students have b/d confusion then it is better to not use both in a focus activity/follow up task.

-Reading recovery teachers don't use the "read on" strategy. They work on fixing up at the point of error. So I have not used this strategy at all since then. I have found that this has increased my focus on 'searching through the word' as a strategy for students.

-In shared reading Joan covers up punctuation with sticky notes and takes them away when the students can say what punctuation is hidden. This is a goodie. Try it!

-The biggest takeaway is the reminder of the front loading for a book. She modelled how she does it and I could see from this parts I was missing. I think I am getting better at this and valuing that even though it takes some time and kids are usually eager to get started, it will often save time and gives them the language they need because they will encounter it soon.

Interestingly, Joan also recommended to me that I work out my kaupapa for a reading level. I have not quite sat down and done this but I do think about it. Recently, an experienced teacher took my class for reading over three weeks. And she asked me was a student able to join three phonemes together, e.g. c-a-t. I already had observed that she wasn't doing this and it was interesting to me that she also picked up on this quickly. For her, the student should not be reading yellow texts because this is part of the learning at red level. I took her back a level and shared the information with her mother and she is doing much better at school and home with reading.