Section 6: Assessing reading to support planning

Anne teaches a Grade 2 class in Nanyuki, Kenya. She has recently attended a course on early reading and has returned to school with the chart showing stages of reading development. Anne decides to practise using the chart by choosing three children who she knows are reading at different levels. She chooses I Like to Read, an eight-page storybook from Level 1 on the ASb website that has short sentences, phonically regular words and common words. She downloads the book onto her phone.

At lunchtime, Anne sits down with each child in turn and asks them to share a few pages of the book with her. She has a tick chart ready so that she can record what she learns about each child. If the child is struggling, Anne helps them.

• Hellen can read the first page well. She stumbles over ‘who’, but can work out ‘can I read to’. She uses her knowledge of letters and sounds to read ‘asleep’. She reads ‘who’ correctly the second time. She struggles with the word ‘busy’, but reads it correctly the second time. She breaks ‘grandmother’ and ‘grandfather’ into syllables.
• Florence talks about the boy sitting on a nice chair, reading a book. Anne reads ‘Who can I read to?’ with her. Florence says the baby is asleep and mama is cooking. She is looking at the pictures and not trying to read the words.
• Moses uses his finger to point to words. He takes his time and tries to read each word one after the other. He knows that the storybook’s title is I Like to Read and can use that information to work out what it says on page 1. He struggles with ‘who’ but slowly works out ‘can I read to’. He needs help with page 3 as he wants to read ‘baby’ but doesn’t see a ‘b’, but he can read ‘my’ and ‘ is’.

After each child leaves, Anne uses the stages of reading development chart to decide the reading stage of each child. Anne feels more confident using the chart and decides to repeat the process with more children.

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Patrick is a newly qualified Grade 1 teacher in Kampala, Uganda. He is very keen on child-centred learning and his class are very used to working in pairs using think/pair/share.

Patrick knows that most of his children are still ‘pre-readers’ and he wants to find out who is developing the skills of a beginning reader. He designs a series of lessons to focus on two objectives linked to the stages of reading development chart. Patrick will make notes on three pairs of children in each lesson.

• Focus 1: Can children recognising some words in a patterned text?
• Focus 2: Can children use the first letters of words to predict or begin sounding out a new word?

Patrick is keen to use ICT in his classroom. He has borrowed the school’s overhead projector to show a Storybook in his English lessons. He has chosen Friends, a book with repetitive phrases, high-frequency and phonically regular words, and has downloaded the book on to his phone, projecting to a blank wall.

Lesson 1: pages 1–3

The whole class is encouraged to talk about the pictures. First they think about the pictures on their own, and then they talk about them in a pair. Each pair shares their ideas with another pair. Finally Patrick asks a few groups to share their thoughts. The class reads the first three pages as a chorus. Patrick emphasises how the first letter helps you to remember the names, especially Zizi, Lele and Sisa. Can the children see the letters repeated? Who in the class has a name starting with the same letters? The whole class is excited to recognise letters and familiar words that they have worked on and to have these extra friends in a book!

Lesson 2: pages 4–7

The whole class re-reads pages 1–3 and remembers the names of the friends. The whole class reads page 4 all together: ‘My friend Zizi likes to play soccer.’ Children act out the soccer playing! Patrick emphasises reading from left to right and looking at the first letter of each word. Patrick has cards with each of the seven words – ‘My’, ‘friend’, ‘Zizi’, ‘likes’, ‘to’, ‘play’ and ‘soccer’ – written on a separate card. Children come up to the front of the class and hold the cards up to make the sentence.

Now Patrick gives the class a think/pair/share activity. Page 5 is projected on the wall (or revealed on a large pre-prepared poster sheet): ‘My friend Lele likes to swim.’ Patrick pastes some paper over the word ‘swim’. Patrick holds up a ‘think’ card. All children must look at the picture for 20 seconds and think about what it says. Can they recognise the pattern? Then he holds up the ‘pair’ card and children talk to their partners about page 5.

Patrick moves to observe and make notes on his chosen three pairs of children: who is recognising the pattern of words? After the whole class ‘shares’, Patrick uncovers the word ‘swim’. Children think and pair to discuss what the word might say, and Patrick observes again: are any of the six children using the first letter ‘S’ to read the word ‘swim’? Are children using context and picture to work out the word? Patrick changes the slide to page 6 and then page 7, both followed by think/pair/share. By the end of this lesson all of the children have been involved, and Patrick has closely observed and made notes on six children. (You will find out more about making notes in next part of this section of the course.)

Anne (see Case Study 6.1) decides to use the ‘stages of reading development’ chart in all her lessons – not just in English lessons. By doing this she can quickly make a note of how children are progressing with their reading.

As shown in Figure 6.1, Anne has made a class list in her mark book that includes six ruled columns labelled ‘Pre 1’, ‘Pre 2’, ‘Beg 1’, ‘Beg 2’, ‘Ind 1’ and ‘Ind 2’, as in the chart. There is also space for her to make notes for three reading assessments a year, plus an extra notes column.

Maximise

Figure 6.1: Anne’s mark book, featuring columns from the ‘stages of reading development’ chart

Anne decides to observe four to six children each day during two separate lessons. With 60 children in her class, she can complete the class list in ten to fifteen days. She selects children alphabetically because this makes note-taking easier. Today it will be: Frida, Gideon and Janet in the first lesson, and Jared, Joseph and Lucy in the second.

Anne is doing a science lesson on parts of plants. She has written a title, ‘Parts of a plant’, and has drawn a plant on the board with the first letter of four key words: ‘leaf’, ‘stem’, ‘root’ and ‘flower’. She goes over the key words with the whole class and writes up the words in large print.

Anne then divides the class into small groups of four. Each group has a real plant to look at and four pieces of card with these four words on one side and the initial letters on the other side. Groups are asked to talk about the plant, take a card each and rehearse the names of each part. They then swap cards in the group and help each other to become confident with the words and plant parts. Every five minutes they change their plant with another group and repeat the cards activity. The whole class is busy and engaged. This gives Anne time to move to the groups that Frida, Gideon and Janet are in. Anne has a copy of the cards and a Grade 1 textbook with more writing about plants. She asks each of the three children questions appropriate to their reading level:

1. Can you read the four initial letters ‘l’, ‘s’, ‘r’ and ‘f’?
2. Can you read the words ‘leaf’, ‘stem’, ‘root’ and ‘flower’?
3. What is the title of the diagram? (The answer is ‘Parts of a plant’.)
4. Can you read this line from the Grade 1 textbook? (It’s a question that the children are not familiar with: ‘What parts of a plant do we eat? Root, leaf, stem, flower, seed or fruit?’)

Anne knows Frida is lively and likes to try and answer in class, but she finds reading difficult. She notices that Frida uses her finger to follow words and mostly starts at the left. Anne finds that Frida cannot give her the sounds of ‘P’, ‘L’ or ‘R’, but does know the sound of ‘F’ (for Frida!) and ‘S’ or ‘snake’ – a sound they’ve just been practising in class. Anne notes Frida down as ‘Pre 2’ and notes that Frida needs a lot more practice on initial sounds and a few sight words.

Anne knows that Gideon always puts his hand up to read from the board. She is confident he can read the words and the title, and quickly checks this. But can he read a question from the textbook that he hasn’t seen before? She shows him the textbook and asks him to read the first sentence. Gideon doesn’t use his finger and reads quite confidently: ‘What parts of a plant do we eat? Root, leaf, stem, flower, seed or fruit?’ ‘Seed’ and ‘fruit’ are new words: Gideon uses his knowledge of phonics to read ‘seed’, and blends ‘fr’ together to begin ‘fruit’. He hesitates – ‘–uit’ is an unusual spelling – but he makes a guess from the context and reads ‘fruit’. Anne notes Gideon down as ‘Ind 2’ and makes a note that she must give him extra books to extend his reading.

Janet is a very quiet girl who never puts her hand up. Anne is not sure how well she is progressing, but on her own, Janet is happy to have a go at reading. She uses her finger from left to right and knows all the initial letter sounds. She can slowly read the four familiar words. She struggles with the title ‘Parts of a plant’, as she reads ‘plant’ twice. She uses her finger on the textbook but can’t read ‘what’, and needs help from Anne to move across the rest of the sentence and recognise the familiar words in a different context. Anne notes Janet down as ‘Beg 1’ and makes a note that Janet will work best in a pair, not a large group, and is ready to begin blending sounds.

Whilst working with Frida, Anne notices that one of Frida’s group, Collins, is very eager to help Frida get the right answers. Although Collins is not on Anne’s target list today, she also quickly makes a note in the mark book that he knows all his initial letters and some sight words, and is now working at the ‘Beg 2’ level: Anne needs to check up on that!

Anne spends about five minutes with each child and is also able to keep an eye on the class’s group work. She then resumes the whole class lesson. After morning playtime, she will make notes on Jared, Joseph and Lucy’s reading progress during the literacy lesson.

It takes Anne two to three weeks to complete the class list; some days she is not able to cover as many observations, and some days she can do more. She is pleased with how much better she knows the children’s reading stages: who needs extra help and who needs to move to the next step. With this detailed information she can plan for some differentiated activities in future lessons, such as grouping children with others of a similar reading ability. The colours on the chart are useful here, for example in creating red, yellow and green groups. Anne can also plan for spending extra time with (red group) pre-readers. She decides to use this reading record book to add extra notes throughout the week – whenever she notices something specific about individual children, for example. Anne plans to repeat this detailed assessment of every child at least once a term, and will eventually pass her record book on to the Grade 3 teacher so that they will be well informed about each child’s reading progress.

This case study is also available to download.

Stories taken apart and put together

Mrs Ndaba’s Grade 6 class had brought stories from home and illustrated them. On each page, they had written a sentence and drawn a picture to match it. The pages had been tied together to make books.

Her colleague, Ms Mdlalose, who taught the Grade 3s, had seen the illustrated stories, and asked to borrow them for a reading activity with her children. Mrs Ndaba came and watched.

Ms Mdlalose divided her class into five groups. She gave each group a story but she untied the pages. She then gave each child in the group one page of the story, making sure that she mixed the order of the pages. Each child had to read the sentence on their page to the group. The group discussed the sentences to decide which order the sentences should go in.

Ms Mdlalose asked one child from each group to read their group’s story to the class and they commented about the order. As a class, they selected their favourite story and prepared a five-minute drama to perform this story.

Collecting local stories

I asked my Grade 2 children to learn a story from their family members or neighbours. I gave them about a week to collect and learn the story. I then invited one or two children a day to tell their story to the class, using different voices, gestures and actions to accompany it. Not everyone was confident enough to do this, so I let them choose whether or not they wanted to. For each story, I wrote a few key words on the chalkboard.

The children told their stories in their local language. Afterwards, I asked the class to draw pictures of the key events or main characters in a story they had heard. If they were confident, I encouraged them to write down some of the key words. Working in pairs, I let the independent readers share their words and pictures with a beginning reader, getting the beginning reader to try and read the written words. Sometimes I challenged them to think of key words in the story that begin with a certain letter. (For example, Baron told a story about a monkey, so I asked them to try and find words beginning with ‘m’.)

By sharing the stories from their communities with their peers, this activity builds connections among the children in the class.

This case study is also available to download.