Section 6: Assessing reading to support planning

Introduction

In this section you will:

• look at a tool that assesses reading development
• develop strategies for assessing children’s reading levels and ways of recording them
• consider different strategies for supporting children in moving to the next level.

In Section 5 you focused on using storybooks to support your work as an early reading teacher. You began to think about how different stories are helpful for different children. Some children need lots of repetition; others need to practise letters and sounds; still others find reading easy and need to be given more opportunities to extend their reading choices. In order to be able to plan an effective reading lesson, you need to be able to assess your children and work out how to help them.

This section is not about the formal, summative assessment of reading. How reading is assessed in your country will depend on the systems and processes that have been put in place, and will be different for each country.

This section is about the ongoing formative assessment that effective teacher of reading do all the time to plan their teaching. If you have a large class, you will not be able to assess individual children’s reading as often as you might like to, but there is plenty that you can do that will make a difference and help you to be an effective teacher of reading.