Term 3 Reflection

 I am now in my fourth week of implementing the Better Start Literacy Approach and I am happy to report that I am seeing the value it brings to the classroom. The children seem much more confident at tackling unknown words and I have been encouraged through the comprehensive planning provided, to be more ambitious and talk about things like Suffixes and Prefixes, Third Person, Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives.

We are retelling our whole class storybook each week and referring to the Story Elements of Character, Setting, Problem, Plan, Actions and Ending, and have begun unpacking the characters' feelings as they change throughout the story.

It has been a challenge in many ways. Timetabling has been one as with such a large whole class element before even getting into small group teaching, Reading now takes 90 minutes per day (although Writing is incorporated within this too). As we cross-group between our two Year 3 classes for Reading (and not Writing) this has been something to be mindful of!

I have enjoyed seeing what seems like significant progress in both the attempts at reading unknown words and attempts at spelling words the children have never spelt before. The word chain element of the whole class teaching and the segmentation and blending of the sounds in words has paid dividends here I think. It has been noticeable in one of my groups in particular, that has a child who had just begun reading at Green on the colour wheel, grouped with a child who was reading at Emerald (that's a 3 year difference in Reading Ages traditionally speaking)! They are both getting value out of the same small group instruction, as the traditionally 'lower' reader is very strong in phonics knowledge, while the 'higher' reader (who is also ESOL) has a lot of confused sounds - particularly when it comes to vowel knowledge. 

Now that I am in the swing of things with my classroom programme, I look forward to compiling my Oral Narrative data over the school holidays and planning to purposefully teach to the gaps in vocabulary and comprehension - hopefully with some exciting independent tasks. Although I am mindful Term 4 will be full of distractions like Swimming, Testing, Athletics and Report writing.

Here is an example of some of what we have been doing independently: