Assessing reading in your classroom
In order to assess children’s reading skills, you need to develop the habit of noticing. You need to watch, listen, ask questions and carefully observe children at work. By adopting the active approaches described in the case studies in this course, you will be able to:
- listen to children as they talk in pairs or groups
- walk around the room, watching and listening while they are working on a task
- learn a lot from the questions they ask you.
Remember that children are using their reading skills in most lessons, not just in literacy lessons.
As you develop your skills in active teaching, you will find that there are many, often unexpected, opportunities to gather information about your children. They will tell you something, solve a problem or ask a question that tells you something new about their literacy development.
However, you should also aim to deliberately assess your children in a systematic way. A good strategy is to focus on five to six children in each literacy lesson. As you plan the lesson, think about how the activities that you are designing will enable children to demonstrate one or more of the skills on the chart.
Read Case Study 6.2 and then try the activity that follows. Notice how Patrick involves all his children in the activities, but uses the opportunity to concentrate on six of them.
Case Study 6.2: Patrick’s Grade 1 class
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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , 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.)
Something to think about: Do you think that lessons 1 and 2 achieved the two focus areas that Patrick planned for?
Lessons 3–10: pages 8–17
These lessons repeat the format of lesson 2, but look at new pages of repetitive text.
Patrick is able to observe new pairs of children in each lesson. Lessons 5–10 gradually develop work on the book, using cut-up words to recreate text. By the end, the whole class acts out the book using actions and word cards.
After ten lessons, Patrick has closely observed all 60 of his children and has noted down who are beginning readers, who are still at the pre-reading stage, and even who is becoming a more independent reader. Patrick uses this information to plan future lessons.
Activity 6.2: Focusing on a few children
Think about your next literacy lesson and choose an appropriate focus from the ‘stages of reading development’ chart.
- Devise an activity so you can carefully observe four to six children at work. Discuss your plan with a colleague.
- Think about how you could use your observations from this activity to plan future lessons. Record your ideas in your study notebook.
- If you get the chance to try your activity, consider the following questions:
- How well did it work?
- Did it give you an opportunity to notice children’s reading skills?
- Were you able to place children in the categories identified in the chart from pre-reader to independent reader?
Stages of reading development
