Activity 3.7: Monitoring reading skills

Listen to the audio or read the transcript where you can hear Wilson talking about how he has started monitoring the reading skills of his Grade 6 class.

Audio transcript

I am the teacher of a large Grade 6 class and I had become more and more concerned that I just didn’t have time to check the reading ability of all my students during normal lesson time. A few of my students are great readers and I know I tend to use them a lot when I want a learner to read aloud from the textbook because it saves time. I needed a better way of monitoring the skills of the whole class, as there are some students I had not heard read aloud for quite some time. So, for a month, every time I listened to a learner read, I made a note of it and how they did in my mark book. I deliberately created opportunities for less confident readers to read to me individually, rather than to the whole class.

It took a few weeks, but now I have listened to all the learners in my class and I have now been able to group them into reading sets which I believe will help them improve and practise their skills. Thanks to this information, I also sometimes use learners from the top reading groups to help learners who find reading more difficult. 

In order to do this, Wilson made a chart with each student’s name, the date and a space for comments. Over the period of a month he found time to listen to each learner in his class and to complete a table like the one you can see below:

This model of monitoring can be used in all subjects. After listening to Wilson (or reading his thoughts) and looking at his table, reflect on and discuss with colleagues how this would work in your own subject.

• What is the advantage of this method of monitoring learners’ reading skills?
• How could you create opportunities to do something similar in your class?

Using a mark book, or your Teacher Notebook, make a plan for monitoring learners’ in your subject for the next month. Think about the key knowledge, skills and values that you want them to learn, and devise a way of recording their progress. You could use a table like this: