If you have been following my blogs, you'll know that most of the work I have been doing this year, spring boarded from the learning that is summarised on this post from January.
There's still a problem with structured literacy
Just one snippet of my literacy approach this year has been based around the class texts that I have been writing, with the inspiration of the children. I have listened in to their conversations, eavesdropped into their play and been inspired.
I've posted about these on my facebook page quite frequently. Basically they are three part texts, featuring a cast of characters that children get to know, that have fun together. I am reluctant to refer to them as decodable texts, because for some of my class they are 95% decodable, while for others, just 70%. They read these texts, while sitting next to a buddy and with me there to help them with any sound spelling patterns they do not yet know.
While the usual point of decodable readers is to practice the code that children are learning and consolidate the parts of the code already learned, that really hasn't been the point of these. Whilst they do contain parts of the code we are working on, they often reach far beyond this. Largely the point of these stories as fluency. The passages, read through an I do, we do, you do, model are repeatedly practiced. Each day, children encounter a new part and reread the one before. They are then read with buddies and revisited at home. As these texts are read out loud, they are the perfect change to model appropriate expression,
Hasbrouck and Glaser (2019) define fluency as: Reasonably accurate reading, at an appropriate rate, with suitable expression, that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read.
The point of these texts was to hit on all parts of this definition, but in particular the 'motivation' to read. Co-constructing the cast of characters over time and the adventures they would have, has seen a massive level of buy in from the children, that even I had not expected.
After fluency, the other main point of these texts was sentence level comprehension. There are kāo pictures, children are having to read each sentence and think about the meaning that is being conveyed. They have been involved in so much meaning making using these simple texts, inferring, predicting, summarising have all been part of this. The pictures they draw at the end of each part, show a real connection with these short stories.
Lastly, but certainly not least, these texts were intended to ensure every child feels good about themselves as a reader. They look around and everyone has the same text, there is kāo sense that the book I am reading is more complex, or simple than the person next to me. At some points words in the texts have puzzled everyone and together the sense of pride when this was decoded has been magical to see. Absolutely there are parts of the stories that have been hard for some, but there is a sense of great achievement at eventually being able to read this story fluently. Funnily enough, but not unexpectedly, the words that occur frequently in these texts, like 'fox' 'little' 'green' 'frog' etc have become sight words for everyone. They see them so frequently and have mapped them so often, that they just know them.
The impacts on reading have been better than expected, particularly in confidence (how I see myself as a reader when compared to my friends) and in motivation to read. For those children that seem to really grasp the code quickly, there has also been a heck of a lot of self-teaching going on.
Now for the point of this post. The unintentional impact that these stories have had on my class and their progress.
That unintentional impact has been in writing. Right from the beginning, the children connected with these characters. We operate within a pedagogy of play and on many occasions children could be found writing about these characters and drawing them. Our storytelling puppet Pearl, would often come to visit and expand on the rather simple written versions of the stories, with her own quirky perspective. Children often had their own puppets out, making up stories for the characters.
Because the characters became quite familiar, so did the spelling of their names. This meant children frequently used them as a scaffold into writing. Over time, their stories became more developed. The three part nature of our stories, naturally lead children into following this pattern in their writing and as they became more fluent in their writing, the stories they wrote became more developed. Knowing these characters seemed to reduce any burden on cognitive load, freeing them up to come up with ideas for their adventures.
Our stories also exposed them very deliberately, to basic use of punctuation, over time this began to exclamation marks, question marks and speech marks. I've never had a year two class experiment independently with speech marks in their own writing, but this group are, the only real difference in my teaching is the exposure they have had to the punctuation through our focus on expression. Through our reading, we have brought this punctuation to life and it now seems they have a much better understanding of the role it plays.
Children also knew I was writing the stories. Funnily enough this seemed to make them more attuned to the choices I was making. They are noticing the changes in my writing like never before. Even down to my use of 'the seven friends' with one girl saying "hey I get that, it is easier to say the seven friends then to list the names, it sounds better too!"
Over the last couple of weeks for our writing I have encouraged children to come up with the adventures that the friends will have before the end of term. For a class of year two children, this task has seemed very easy and super enjoyable. They are seeing themselves as authors.
It seems strange to me that such a simple tweak to my approach has had such massive impacts. These stories are basic, they are not that exciting and certainly, I am not an author. But children are 'in' the stories, they can see their own ideas, they can see how the adventures have developed, they know who is writing them and they have a sense of ownership. This really seems to have made a massive difference!
These stories will not be replicated for next years class, they belong to the class of this year. So the characters will be retired and the stories taken home with the children. I'll get my inspiration for 2024 from the children that sit in front of me then.
These are some examples of the stories we have read. They are certainly not perfect and it has been a real learning curve writing these this year.
