Number Agents

 This post will be a little off the beaten track, but I had such a huge amount of fun in the last four weeks of term, that I just had to post about it.  It also has been an age since I have written about anything drama related that holds such a huge place in my teacher heart that I thought it deserved a place in my recent blog posts. Firstly, how in the heck does this relate to the Science of Reading?  Well if we look at the rope, we would see it relates heavily to the language comprehension side and then in the Active view of reading (which I prefer, again it features here.) My focus was largely on vocabulary development and background knowledge, but there were a heck of a lot of micro-skills going on as well when it comes to comprehension.   I have talked also before about the pillars of literacy.  This podcast with Lyn Stone is a great one to listen to, if you have not before. https://soundcloud.com/ollielovell/errr-066-lyn-stone-on-literacy-instruction-...

 Over the last two years I have become increasingly discontent with the way I have taught reading.  As many of you will know, we made the move to structured literacy about six years ago.  This has been massive for me, it meant a lot of change and a lot of learning, each year I have gotten better as I have learned more. Last year, I moved into a single cell classroom with Year 2 and 3 children, rather than my new entrant, year one mix.  This meant I wasn't able to do individual sessions and needed to group.  During the year I made tweaks and changes to these groups, as they became literacy groups, rather than reading groups, after all this isn't called structured reading.  But I had five groups, which meant I only really had time to see three a day if I was lucky.  Within even those five groups, the needs were quite diverse.  I also had tier two individual children that I was reading with at least twice a week, but preferably three  and was tr...