Adding a bit of drama to the Science of Reading

 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-and-the-big-six?utm_source=clipboard&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Follielovell%252Ferrr-066-lyn-stone-on-literacy-instruction-and-the-big-six

I have added oral language to the base of these pillars, because I really see it as underpinning them all and ten years ago, it was where my journey started.

Hugh Catts also has some interesting thoughts on the pillars, particularly around comprehension...you can find that in a previous post if you are interested.

Right back to the point of this post....my latest dramatic inquiry, or perhaps in many ways a mini mantle.  Whatever you term it, it was, as Viv Aitken would say "Real in all the ways that matter."

The adventure into this world, started with two very real goals. 

1.  To help children to develop the ability to see perspective and develop the skills of empathy and respect.

Like many schools, our children are really struggling at the moment.  Small niggly behaviours have crept in to our everyday lives, they have had a rough few years and it really shows.  They are much more 'sandpapered' or aggravated by each other and really struggle to see another's perspective.  What I know is that there is nothing like the gift of drama to explore these social, emotional skills in a safe way, so it was obviously what I saw most appropriate to use.  

Let's face it, kids do well if they can and if they can't, rather than rewarding those that can already with prizes and tickets, or thinking they can learn it from a programme or workbook, we need to develop the skills for everyone.  If you can't ride a bike, you work on riding a bike with support, if you can't read, we work on developing your reading skills, so in turn it is true of social and emotional learning, if you are not able to use these skills yet, we develop them in a way that we know works.  

In my opinion there are there are two top ways to develop these skills, play (where the teacher actively notices, responds, models and draws attention to these skills) and drama, where children are placed in  situations where they can explore these skills safely often through the eyes of another.

It is no coincidence that both these approaches have relationships as a core way of working, and we know that it is relationships that are transformative.

2. I wanted to really tune into background knowledge and vocabulary development in a rich way, of course facilitating oral language development along the way.  I also had a key goal of really thinking about micro-comprehension through the narrative that was woven.  More about this here

So to the actual adventure:

Many of you that follow my facebook page, will have read the instalments about the bunnies...but basically this is the scenario (this was my first facebook post). You can find the posts on my page if you want more info about each day.

Think about the movie Watership Down (that movie traumatised me for life)…a group of bunnies seeing yellow creatures moving towards them, making rumbling sounds, seemingly on a path to destroy their little bit of paradise, their beautiful habitat. Our weighty warrior cottontail delivered us this letter from their cousins.

Children were quick to invest emotionally…and quickly worked out what the mysterious yellow creatures must be.

We’ve written back, but are very worried about this group. Children brought up concerns around the need for them to find a new home, but were also concerned that any new home would be really different and scary for them. They’d need a lot of support.

So our next steps, it will clear that these rabbits will need to move, though not all will be keen straight away and some convincing will need to happen . It will also be clear that means we need to offer them that home. As they are many miles away from us they’ll need to travel and that journey won’t be easy. A map will appear that shows the location of their forest, the location of the machines and our location. This will allow us to track their journey and the journey of the machines.

We will talk about the fact they’ve been displaced and will be feeling vulnerable, allowing us to focus on the skills we will need to help them adjust. Kindness, perspective taking, empathy etc.

We will also touch on what people displaced from their homes are called and explore how this would feel.

We will also look at what destruction of natural habitats looks like around the world. We might need to talk to the operators of the machines and help them understand.

This little inquiry was inspired by the fact we are really struggling with children’s ability to take perspective, have compassion, treat others how we want to be treated and show respect. I wanted to give them a reason to develop these skills.

I’m not quite sure how this will unfold or what edgy adventures the bunnies will face on their journey, it will unfold like any good story, the children will help with that.

And yep a group of beautiful soft snuggly bunnies will eventually make their way to our doorstep for us to love, just like the real thing.

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The story evolved from there, a series of letters arrived, which we replied to and as with any great dramatic inquiry/mini mantle there was a lot of knowledge we needed along the way.  Bits and pieces from their world, linked to ours, like Big Old Tree, who stood for the Puriri tree in our grounds, that was planted at the end of the war.

Children largely drove the direction and the letters became my script.  

By the end of it, children were able to go into role as the main characters, explore and present arguments from their perspective and even found a compromise that would never have been on the table at the beginning.  The character they initially saw as the villain actually had kind intent and in the end there were many different needs to consider.

As part of our work we used this book, to be honest, it could be a whole dramatic inquiry on its own.  It is just beautiful and explores what it is to be homeless.

Children were captured by this world the moment the door opened.  They invested in it, while they knew it was imagined, there was so many correlations between the world of the bunnies and our world, that it felt so very real.  

They loved the bunnies, they loved Big Old Tree and when the last letter came, there were some tears.  One little lady summed it up so beautifully 

"The bunnies taught us so much, I am really going to miss them."

I have attached a mind map a the end of this blog post to show the areas we covered through this DI.

Children spent a lot of their own time drawing pictures for the bunnies and writing to them

What it looked like when our bunny friends contacted us.

Lots of things were made for the bunnies on a daily basis

We travelled ten years forward in time, to see what change we had created!  What I love about drama!

Children rejoiced when some lovely cuddly bunny friends arrived of our very own.  

A soft toy on the outside, but real in their hearts.

Here are the screenshots of the letters, hard to read as they are just screenshots, but it gives you an idea of my 'script.'

This was massively successful on many levels, but it was also just a fantastic way to end the term.  I know this group of children are just going to love it when we open the portal during maths next term.

Whole Class Reading - My Experience So Far

 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 trying to catch everyone once a fortnight to check in with where they were at and set new goals for home and school.

Each group would take me about fifteen minutes and as the year went on I really questioned the effectiveness of these groups.   There was little movement between groups, and while children made progress, they generally moved together as I was narrowly focusing on what stage they were 'at'. 

I also didn't think I was working hard enough on sentence level comprehension, or growing their automaticity or prosody as I needed to, in order to enable fluency.

Because I was so strapped for time, the need to deliberately work on growing background knowledge and vocabulary which we know are so important for comprehension, didn't happen as often as I would have liked.

The more I listened to fabulous podcasts (my main mode of learning) the more I questioned and wondered.

I saw the year out, but really didn't feel I was doing all I could for my children.

Over the holidays I did a massive amount of learning about fluency, comprehension and the importance of repeated reading.  I started to find out more about a whole class approach for literacy and it really peaked my interest.  I have shared all my holiday learning in a previous post.

This whole class approach was based on pitching the reading at the mid to top end, and the whole idea was to differentiate the support, not the text.

I had several goals moving into this:

*Create engaging texts that children enjoyed, that stretched them just enough, but that they could read in parts, each day offering a new part and every day comprehending at a sentence level what was happening and representing this visually.  I didn't want these texts to be long, so the idea of presenting it in parts over three days really appealed to me.   I also wanted them to have a say in the characters we encountered in the stories, this ownership and connection with the stories feels really important to me and it is something I try to weave into everything I do.  I largely wanted these texts to be decodable based on the code that all children had secure, but these texts would include some patterns or words I would need to tell children.

*Combine everything I had been doing into one session (split into two parts over the day). phonemic awareness, encoding, decoding, dictated sentence, weekly poem or nursery rhyme to learn, heart word learning, focus sound each day and focus on formation of letters/handwriting (spelling of sounds.). Really pinpoint the needs and deliberately and explicitly teach them.

*Ensure children had several decodable books at one stage below their working level that they could work towards reading with automaticity and prosody, engage in repeated reading of these texts.  I also wanted to help families understand the importance of this practice and understand the importance of automaticity.

*Ensure children have daily access to the books they can read and that they also have an idea of what automatic reading and fluency are.  

*Provide tier two individual support at least twice a week for those that need it.  I do have a few who have entered from other schools and need that individual support to get them going.

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So as I come to the end of the term, I thought it was a useful time to reflect on how it is all going.

We've had time with all the disruptions for five weeks of good structured whole class sessions.  To start with, it took a bit for me to find my rhythm and to find a perky pace, it also took a few sessions for children to get used to the routine.  I quickly established 'reading buddies' for them, so they could support each other, this really helped.  They really enjoy this time, which once again debunks so many of the arguments against this type of teaching.  What I have come to understand is that it is hard to love something you are not good at, being successful is a massive motivator.  

I still have to have my plan sitting on my lap, but the sessions themselves flow really well.  We end up doing two 15 minute blocks, which is still a long time to keep them sitting, so we have two sections within the session where we get up and move.  My plans are certainly not perfect and I am still working on them to find the right balance.  I am learning in this process and so give myself the grace and space to make mistakes and evolve.  I think that is the most important thing for everyone to remember, take it slow, pick one small step at a time and be kind to yourself, this is transformative in terms of our practice and certainly not an easy journey.

So far there are absolutely no negatives.  Children are getting a lot more quality time within these structured sessions and it is showing.  We started around mid stage two and have moved through to the end of stage four with our focus sounds.  This means that children are not narrowly kept in the 'window' of a focus stage, but developing understandings and knowledge I wouldn't have usually presented to them if they were in my 'stage two' group for example.  This also means they are getting lots of repeated practice and review, this is helping me to see just how often you have to touch on something to make it stick.  Learning about the forgetting curve helped my practice in this area.  I was also conscious of not causing cognitive overload, so wanted to be building fluency through automaticity and the building of knowledge schema to allow much of the learning to be 'easy.'

Fluency is amazing, the repeated reading and the focus on automaticity is really paying off.   Children decode with skill when they come to unknown words, but they are reading most texts with a high level of fluency.  Because I introduce a part of the story each day, they are being scaffolded really well in this process.  I try to keep the decodable texts about 90% decodable within stage 1-4, but also like to start introducing spelling patterns that they have not be taught yet, while these are not a focus, I am finding children are picking up on these really quickly and when we come to specifically teaching these patterns, they will have this previous exposure to connect the new understanding to.  

I am unsure which podcast it was, but this sentence really resonates with me, differentiate the support, not the text.  That is what I am doing and it is really paying off.  For children to be able to sit and read a text that the child next to me is reading (who used to be in a higher group) is really empowering for the children.  The smiles on their faces when they realise they have read the whole thing with very little support is just infectious.

It is the progress that is of most note, it has been much more rapid in this term and along with most moving 2-3 stages within the term, children are also nailing spelling and formation.  Not only that, their comprehension at sentence level has been delightful to see.  They look forward to seeing what is happening next and talk avidly about what they have noticed.  For example in the text we read this week, the fox was standing on a slippery log, it was implied that perhaps he could fall in the pond.  Today's sentence made it clear that he had indeed slipped into the pond.  I heard giggles coming from the children when they realised and loved listening to them excitedly sharing that he had fallen in the pond.  These are their characters and they are 'in' the story.   

 It is important to note that when I talk about stages, I am not just talking about reading, I closely monitor a child's progress within that stage in terms of spelling, formation, letter naming, heart word spelling and reading etc.  I acknowledge that their reading abilities will often track slightly higher than their formation and spelling, but I want to ensure this gap does not get too wide, we are noticing for our older children, that didn't start with such good foundations, is that their reading is going really well, but many struggle with spelling, the gap is wide and now harder to bridge.

Children are also so proud of being able to read these texts, with no colour to fixate on (the old I am red, stage two) they are just enjoying reading and feel like the texts are more complicated (even though I know they are not.) Success is breeding success and the stories are glued into their home and school books, which means lots of repeated reading can happen.  Next term I will create some browsing books with these texts, so they can revisit them in class.

This approach has made it possible to ensure distributed review and repeated practice and it is making such a difference.  I know that my children are getting a much better deal this year! 

Something I have started to tweak over the last few weeks is the use of our handwriting books instead of whiteboards.  Writing their name daily and our focus sounds on the lines, along with our dictated sense, in the book makes much more sense.  It also allows me to put small scaffolds in place (writing the name or letter correctly for them to see.). I am also noticing big improvements in this area.

When it comes to writing, that is captured largely through these structured sessions.  Where to start, spacing, formation and the skill of remembering a sentence to then write about.  The sentences connect to our stories.  Something that works really well for remembering the sentences, is punching the words.  We find a space in the class.  I punch as I say each word, they copy, we do it together and then they do.  By the time we have done this several times, the sentence is stuck in their head.

To complement this we use storytelling.  I like to pick a text and use it in a similar way to T4W.  We have a puppet called Pearl who loves to come in and share fantastic stories with us and we love to make up our own stories and share them.

Our nursery rhymes and poems also link into this, with lots of talk.  

This is an example of a plan for Term 1.  This will change this term as I have more idea of what to tweak, so I am concentrating on the stuff and not the fluff.

Weekly plan

Things I plan to work in Term 2:

*I am going to refine down the plan, the slideshows of our review sounds and blending, while they will still be done, can be done in the moments of time we have in the day, rather than taking up time in our formal lesson.  Instead in the review section I can focus on the prior days sound, or something they have been struggling with.

*I want to build in more space of 'independent writing.'  While we are focusing on the nuts and bolts of a sentence and building ability to form letters and spell, I don't feel I have gifted them enough time to write. So I will change the cycle a little.  Three days of structured sessions, one day of a focus on independent writing and so on.  I also want to start doing the 'word web' that I was doing last year, where we have a central word and generate vocab that links to this word in the form of a web.

*Really think about phonemic awareness and be deliberate about how I am presenting this and why.

So that is it for now, I have learned a massive amount in a short time and while it is certainly a long way from perfect, I can see how this approach can really impact children and their progress.   As always time is such a factor and for me, and you do need to accept that you can not achieve everything perfectly every day.

Give yourself grace, space and time, what we are learning is massive, but even greater than that, is what we are unlearning.