A Shared Reading lesson with self-drawn pictures and sequencing, in the Foundation Phase.

This post is being written as Deb Avery conducts a Grade 1 Shared reading lesson at Victoria Primary in Grahamstown. The Grade 1 girls are all sitting on the mat at the front of the classroom. A group of Foundation phase teachers sit on the mat at the back of the classroom along the wall observing the lesson. The aim of the lesson is to read a story from a Big Book with understanding, and reconstruct the text in joint rewriting.

The Preparing for Reading stage
Deb gets to know the class and relates the story to the context of the girls. The girls want to tell her lots of stories. Deb summarises the story. She has drawn pictures because the story has no pictures. This is to show that it if one has a good story but no pictures, one can create one's own images even if you can't really draw! As she summarises the story and show the pictures she develops the vocabulary of the learners. This section ends with Deb reading the story to the girls. The girls loved to recite the repetitive parts.

Preparing for Reading stage

Deb reads the story

Sentence making
Deb now reads the story again and as she finishes a page she hands the words an pictures to a child. After she has one this she reads the story again and the learners recognise whether they are holding that part of the story. The girls sequence the story correctly.

Handing out a piece of story after reading it

All the girls with their piece of story, in sequence

Deb retells the story again pointing to each text. Deb then questions the learners for their comprehension of the text. After that the girls give back the story pictures an words, and Deb hands out the sentence strips.

Handing out the sentence strips

The learners work in groups. As Deb calls out questions they cut out the wors from the sentence strips, taking it in turns. Deb points out language along the way. She affirms all the way when someone answers the questions correctly.

The girls read the sentence strips together

They take turns cutting out the words, as directed by Deb's questioning,

Spelling stage
Deb works with selected words and breaks them into syllables.

Breaking selected words into letter patterns

Vocabulary building

Joint rewriting
Following the patterns of the text the learners reconstruct the story with different characters an settings. Deb lets them vote for different aspects of the story. She writes it on the board and the learners read the new story. 

Independent writing
We didn't have time to complete the next stage which is Independent writing. In this stage the learners write their own story or sentence and draw a picture. 

This was a great lesson. It was long yet the learners remained engaged all the way through. 

Working with factual text using the Reading to Learn methodology

This post is being written as Deb Avery conducts a Grade 4 Science lesson on the topic of  Énergy at Victoria Primary in Grahamstown. The Grade 4 girls are all sitting at their desks in the classroom. A group of Intermediate Phase teachers are sitting at the back of the classroom next to me, observing the lesson. They are as engaged as the girls!  the aim of the lesson is to unerstand the text on Energy and make one's own notes from it.

Preparing for Reading stage
First comes the Preparing for Reading stage. Deb gets to know the class an links the topic cleverly to the class’s prior knowledge. She explains where the text will be found and gives a summary of the text.

Preparing for Reading stage

Detailed Reading stage
In the Detailed Reading session the girls read through the section with Deb. They work with vocabulary, synonyms and comprehension questions, guided by Deb.  They are then given a copy of the page from the textbook as they are not allowed to write in their textbooks. They number the sentences and underlined keywords. Deb asks 'wh' questions as they identify the keywords together.

Today's text

Intensive Strategies stage
In the Intensive Strategies session the girls each get a paragraph to illustrate how to work with keywords. They cut up the text as guided by Deb's questions. They then jumble the cutouts and have a competition to see who can put them in order first.

The paragraph that is cut up

Cutting out the words

Putting the sentences together again

Joint rewriting session
Deb writes the keywords from the first three sentences on the board. (The class calls out out the keywords).  Different girls call out their recreated sentence and Deb chooses one girl to go to the board and write it. The girl goes to the board and writes a simplified sentence next to the original sentence. Different girls give their versions of the other two sentences using the keywords and the same procedure is followed.

The first sentence is written

The second sentence is written

The third sentence is written

Joint reconstruction of the third sentence is complete

Independent reconstruction
We had to leave after this stage because Deb needed to give a demonstration lesson in Grade 1. The Grade 4 teacher then took over for the Independent Reconstruction stage where the girls would  completely reconstruct the text and make their own notes.

It was a brilliant lesson. The teacher sitting next to me was excited about it and said she would definitely be doing a factual text like this next term. (School closes tomorrow).

A week of teaching demonstrations in Grahamstown using the Reading to Learn methodology

Currently I am in Grahamstown assisting Deb Avery from Reading to Learn wherever possible.  Deb has been training an enthusiastic group of teachers from three schools in a Reaing to Learn course.  Read 'Five great things you need to know about the Reading to Learn methodology' to find out more about this very effective reading approach.

Deb Avery is a very experienced and inspiring trainer, and she offered to do reading lesson demonstrations at each school using the Reading to Learn methodologies. This post records the various demonstrations.

Graeme College in Grahamstown - Grade 6 Factual Text lesson
Four teachers from this well-known boys' school are on the course this week. Deb was invited to do two demonstrations at Graeme College.  The first was to a Grade 6 class using a factual text related to what they are learning about at the moment, namely Electrical Circuits. The lesson took placee in the library and was observed by a number of teachers and teaching students. The aim of the lesson was to use a factual text to teach the boys how to make notes from what they read.

First Deb introduced the class to the topic and conducted the Preparing for Reading stage. This included linking the text to prior knowledge, summarising it for the class to give sequence and meaning, and reading the text to the class.

The Preparing for Reading stage

After that a stage known as Detailed Reading was followed. The class gave sentence summaries, and they were guided to find and underline keywords. This was followed by several minutes of language elaboration.

The Detailed Reading stage

This stage was followed by a session of Intensive Strategies where the class got to grip with a section of the text. Synonyms were found for the keywords.  The learners learned to spell key vocabulary and they practiced sentence making.

The Intensive Strategies stage

In further sessions the class will write a new text as a class using the Joint Writing step. This will be done on a flipcart or whiteboard. The final step is for the joint contstruction to be removed and for the learners to rewrite the text on their own with reference to their notes. This heavily scaffolded process will lead to the boys eventually making notes on their own independently.

After this lesson Deb was invited to address the whole staff in the staffroom on the Reading to Learn methodology.

Deb Avery preparing to address the staff.

Graeme College in Grahamstown - Grade 1 Shared Reading lesson
The next lesson was a Shared Reading lesson with Grade 1. A number of the Foundation Phase teachers observed the lesson. The first step was the Preparing for Reading stage where Deb linked the selected text to the boys' context.

Deb links the book to the boys' contexts an prior knowledge

The Shared Reading session followed Deb summarised the story and finally read the story to the Grade 1s. 

Shared Reading

A Sentence Making session followed where intensive strategies were used. Comprehension questions were asked, and the Grade 1s each received a section of the text to work with.

Deb asks relevant questions

Affirming learners who give correct answers

The boys start to manipulate the sentences.

A Spelling session followed.

The boys make sentences and read the words.

Once the class was very familiar with the text they started on the Joint Rewriting stage where the story was rewritten with new characters ann a new setting. Deb used a flipboard to write nthe suggestions for new characters and new events. A vote was taken.'

New ideas

A new story

Finally the Grade 1s were asked to draw a picture of the new story they had created in the Joint Writing section, for homework. Here is what one of the boys came up with,

Holy Cross School Grade 2 and 3 combined lesson
Deb demonstrated a Grade 2 and 3 lesson at the Holy Cross primary school. She selected a text from the Grae 3 Literacy Rainbow books that the Department of Education supplies to the schools.

The Preparing for Reading stage

The Makinng Sentences stage

Victoria Primary Grade 4 Factual Text lesson
The topic for this lesson was 'Energy'. A number of the Intermediate Phase teachers came to observe the lesson. Deb managed to get quite far in the cycle - she completed the Joint Rewriting section where the learners constructed notes together from the keywords. The teacher decided she would complete the lesson when we left and she did the Independent Construction session where each learner makes their own notes from the keywords, in the same way they have just been taught. 

Preparing for Reading stage

Intensive strategies - the learners jumble the text and reconstruct it

Joint Reconstruction stage

Victoria Primary Grade 1 Shared Reading lesson
This lesson was done with the Grade 1 girls. The story was called Hi Zoleka. Deb drew her own pictures on red card to show the teachers that they could make their own illustrations even if they couldn't raw.

The Grade 1s sequence the story

The learners cut up the sentences, jumble them up and reconstruct the sentences. 

Joint Reconstruction stage - writing a new story together

All these lessons were amazing. The learners were thoroghly engaged and the teachers that observed the lessons were very inspired to try out the Reading to Learn methodology, 

Seven children's stories that can be used as Big Books for Shared Reading

Here are some superb children's stories found on YouTube. Try and get the Big Books for these stories to use in Shared Reading lessons.

1. Handa's Hen by Eileen Browne
A lovely pictorial book with vibrant colours, wild creatures and rich culture of the Luo Tribe of South West Kenya. It's a story of two friends Handa & Akeyo looking for Grandma's black hen Mondi.






2. My cat likes to hide in boxes




3. Owl babies




4.  Rosie's walk by Pat Hutchins




5. Where the Wild things are




6. We are going on a bear hunt.



7. The Gruffalo

Places to find free Foundation Phase reading material on the Internet

Nowadays there are so many places where you can find free reading material for your learners on the Internet. I have decided to start keeping a record of these places - they come in so useful in the classroom. Some of these sites are what is known as public domain sites. Every year new publications enter public domain. That means their intellectual property rights have expired or are not applicable any longer. Other sites have Creative Commons texts. They can be downloaded but the original author always has to be acknowledged. Here are just a few useful sites to explore: 

1) The African Storybook Project
http://www.africanstorybook.org/The African Storybook Project (ASP) is a wonderful project originating in South Africa. It is currently creating and encouraging the use of a multilingual, digital library of stories for the first few years of reading (Grades 1-3). The project aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Their vision is for all young African children to have enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading. Users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.
                       
                                    

2) Storyweaver
https://storyweaver.org.in/
Storyweaver a digital repository of multilingual stories for children from Pratham Books in India. It provides access to stories in many different languages. Story Weaver is an open platform and it is designed to be innovative and interactive.Your learners can read, create, translate, or download a multitude of lovely stories. 

3) Pratham Books - Creative Commons
http://www.prathambooks.org
http://bit.ly/2KdxsCc
Pratham Books is a non-for-profit organization that publishes books in multiple Indian languages to promote reading among children. One of those languages is English. They have joined the Creative Commons bandwagon and have had books translated into many languages. Their audio books have been used as teaching tools by volunteers teaching underprivileged children in their neighbourhood, and much more. 

Pratham have a vast number of books. Find some of the free ones here:
1. Creative Commons Originals - Books : Books created by Pratham Books and licensed under CC.
2. Books in the Public Domain - A list of all their books which are under public domain licenses.
3. Creative Commons Illustrations - A collection of illlustrations from their CC-licensed books.

4) Complete Library of Children’s Books online: Rosetta project
http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/library-complete_index.htm

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.

5) Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg offers over 46,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.  Many of the classics can be found at this site.

6) The International Children's Digital Library
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
"The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation) is to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children. The ICDL Foundation is a non-profit corporation." -The ICDL Foundation

7) Readworks

https://www.readworks.org/
The nonprofit organisation, ReadWorks,  provides K-12 teachers with what to teach and how to teach it—online, for free, to be shared broadly. They provide a large, high-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance. 

These are just a few options you might like to investigate. There are many more places that provide freely available reading material for our learners. 

Shared Reading and the 'Reading to Learn' methodology

In the Foundation Phase (Grade R-3 in South Africa) you will often see teachers conducting Shared Reading in their classrooms. Shared Reading is a proven instructional strategy that can be used to teach many different reading skills such as comprehension, fluency, decoding, vocabulary, spelling, and various aspects of language).

What exactly is Shared Reading? 
The Reading Rockets website defines Shared Reading as 'an interactive reading experience that occurs when studdents join in or share the reading of a book or other text while guided and supported by a teacher. The teacher explicitly models the skills of proficient readers, including reading with fluency and expression. The shared reading model often uses oversized books (referred to as big books) with enlarged print and illustrations." http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/shared_reading
.

Deb Avery demonstratig a Shared Readding lesson at Graeme College this week

What are the benefits of using Shared Reading?
There are endless reasons why teachers use Shared Reading as one of their main reading strategies in the Foundation Phase:

• Every child loves being read a story aloud.
• The learners can see the words, match them to the pictures and hear them being read aloud. 
• Struggling readers are well-supporte when a teacher uses Shared Reading.
• Shared reading builds up sight word knowledge, language knowedge and reading fluency. 
• The learners enjoy a full reading experience and cna read lovwely big books with the teacher.
• The teacher provides visual, syntax, and meaning clues so that the learners can decode words. 
• Learners' reading ability improves dramatically when Shared Reaing is applied well,
• Shared Reading introduces before reading, during reading, and after reading strategies that the learners can apply to their own reading

Joyce on the Reading to Learn course applying what she has learned with Grade R

How does Shared Reading fit into the Reading to Learn cycle?Shared Reading is explicitly taught in the Foundation Phase Learning to Read course. The Shared Reading cycle nearly always culminates in a Joint Writing and Independent Writing activity. The whole cycle could take up to three lessons.  Explicit instructions are given for each stage of the cycle. Visit the Reading to Learn South Africa website.

Five great things you need to know about the Reading to Learn methodology

Are you perhaps a teacher? If so, let me ask you a question. How well do your students interact with the text that they read? I mean, really interact with text? I would like to tell you something about a methodology called Reading to Learn that is proving effective right around the world. 

Currently I am in the beautiful town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. I’m with a friend Deb Avery, a trainer of note, who is conducting a Reading to Learn training with some of the local teachers. I am assisting her in whatever way I can, and am learning at the same time! This methodology has had enormous success all over the world - Australia, Europe and a number of African countries to name but a few. In this post I thought I would outline some of the great things I have discovered about Reading to Learn.

1. 'Reading to Learn' is a programme for teaching reading and writing
The Reading to Learn (RtL) programme for teaching reading and writing was developed in a long-term action research project with teachers in Australia at all levels of education, from early primary through to secondary and tertiary study, across curriculum areas. The methodology was originally developed in response to the urgent needs of marginalised learners to rapidly improve reading and writing for educational access and success. 

2. Reading to Learn is based on well-accepted learning theories
Reading to Learn draws on findings of the several important theories. These are Vygotsky's theory of seeing learning as a social process,. Halliday’s model of language as text in social context, and Bernstein’s model of education as pedagogic discourse. The concepts from these theories have been integrated into a set of teaching strategies that especially benefit diverse classroom settings. Teachers can use these strategies very effectively in their classrooms. Reading to Learn is a highly scaffolded methodology which helps learners to unpack text and repack it into writing.

3. The 'Reading to Learn' programme is proving to be very effective
The strategies have been independently evaluated as four times as effective as other literacy approaches at accelerating reading and writing development. The programme is capable of improving learners’reading ability from junior primary to secondary levels within one year (McCrae et al 2000). These strategies are currently being applied in primary, secondary and tertiary contexts in Australia, Indonesia, Africa (South Africa, Kenya, Uganda,) Afghanistan, Sweden and other parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America, with learners from a wide spectrum of language, cultural and educational backgrounds. Reading to Learn South Africa has been involved in the training of teachers in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania for the past three years to support the rollout of the methodology in over 1000 schools in those countries.  The methodology is being used across a range of different languages.

4. Reading to Learn can be applied across the curriculum
Reading to Learn is not only a way of conducting reading lessons. It can be used across the curriculum and across the grades. It can be used at any level where reading needs to be accelerated.  Reading to Learn is not just a methodology for accelerating reading an writing in English. It can also be used in different languages. The methodology does not require expensive resources.

5. South African teachers need to do a Reading to Learn course!
In South Africa our reading statistics are very unsatisfactory. We only need to look at the Pirls results to realise we have a crisis on our hands. The well-known researcher, Nic Spraull writes an interesting blog post entitled 'The unfolding reading crisis: The new PIRLS 2016 results…' http://bit.ly/2MJYvDM. Basically, 78% of South African Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language. Nic Spaull says," SA lags far behind other countries: While 78% of SA Grade 4 kids cannot read, in America this is only 4% and in England, just 3% cannot read. However, the study also included middle-income countries. In Iran, only 35% of Grade 4 students could not read for meaning and in Chile, it was only 13% (PIRLS report page 55)." 8 of 10 SA children cannot read! These findings are no surprise in South Africa! Our ANA results consistently show that comprehension is a huge lack. Our current University dropout and failure rate confirms that something needs to be done.

One answer to this crisis is for teachers to be trained in the Reading to Learn course. In February 2011, Reading to Learn SA was registered as a PBO. The course is registered with SACE as an accredited Professional Development Course. Please visit the Reading to Learn website for South Africa, found at https://readingtolearnsouthafrica.weebly.com/ to find out more.

A group of Grahamstown teachers enjoying the Reaing to Learn training

Let's be proactive and turn around our reading statistics in South Africa!

MTN How to change usage limits

One of the things I have downloaded on my Samsung S8 is the MyMTN app. One thing I like about this app is that it enables you to change your usage limit. I just want to record how you do this.

On your phone:
a) Dail *141*5#
b) Choose Option 1 and follow the prompts thereafter.
c) Whatever you set the usage limit to will show on the app as well.

If you want this to be a one-off thing you must remember to turn it off again after you have bought your data.

I have just turned mine off and MTN sent a message to say if I want to change this at any time to dial *136*5# at any time.  I am not sure why this is a different number, but I am going to record it anyway!