Above is an extract from paper 2 of last year’s KS1 SAT….the ante was very much upped from previous years. This then leads to the question of how can we prepare children for this assessment process without switching them off reading, but allowing them to feel prepared so that nothing will come as a horrible surprise??
AND the Year 2 teachers have to bear in mind the other measures that they can be moderated against in the interim framework…here is what an ‘expected’ child can do in reading…
Quite a challenge it seems….
What can we use to support our teacher assessment for fluency, accuracy and understanding? There are lots of everyday processes that can be used without planning activities to simply tick boxes…
- Reading records books used in school – the expected colour of book banding would be gold, white or above. Check that the phonic phases match and therefore the books being read are appropriate.
- Home/school reading record books – some schools may use Phonics Bug, Lexia or other online reading acivities which can be used at home and often produce reports on what has been read etc.
- Running records – 90% accuracy per page is needed for children to be able to comprehend the text. Here is an interesting article explaining how you can use any book as a running record: http://scholastic.ca/education/movingupwithliteracyplace/pdfs/grade4/runningrecords.pdf
- Standardised reading test – SWRT /Salford which will give a reading age, but will also highlight the words that they are struggling with
- Guided reading book or reading journal – this will evidence understanding of a text
- English book – as above this will show what an individual has understood from texts used as a class
To build up stamina and fluency individual reading needs to happen as often as possible, but the use of ERIC (everyone reading in class) can help children focus on a text independently as they will need to do in the test. I generally do this twice a week from January onwards.
I often use text extracts from http://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk to get children used to reading an ‘unseen’ piece of writing, which also has age range recommendations with each extract so I can ensure that it is suitably challenging.
It is vital that the children have experience of answering questions by writing answers. I like to build in examples from each content domain throughout the year. I found some brilliantly useful question stems on this website http://primaryenglished.co.uk/ which I have used firstly with illustrations and films, building up to using mainly text extracts…
I use these during guided reading sessions, adding different question types as we get nearer to May.
Useful websites and links:
TheLiteracyLeader. 