Posted on: 23/10/2019
A question we are asked time and again, especially by year 6 teachers, is 'how do we build children's stamina for reading?' It’s an important question, and one we know is grounded in preparing children for SATs rather than any teachers’ burning desire to create life-long speed-readers of their children. But really, what do we do? Since there is no mention of reading for speed in the National Curriculum, what we’re really being asked is, how do we get our children reading quickly and fluently and for long enough to sustain their attention to the end of a piece of text that may or may not interest them? Of course, passing a SATs test is not the be-all-and-end-all of teaching children to read. Far from it. What we’re surely aiming to develop in our children, before passing any test, is a love of reading that allows them to explore, to imagine and to learn. After all, unlock the key to reading and we open a child up to a world of possibilities…
So what is the answer? Along with the more obvious suggestions of regular reading across a range of genres or getting children to time their reading speed using a stopwatch (a strategy children love!), the one thing we cannot emphasise strongly enough is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary! Imagine reading a text and having to stop every other word because it is unfamiliar, brand new or used in a context you've never seen before. Can you hope to follow the meaning of what you're reading? Of course not. Can you answer complex comprehension questions about the passage? Even harder. Are you enjoying what you're reading? Almost certainly no. Once children have picked up the ability to decode, their success at reading will largely depend on their ability to understand the words on the page. When children struggle to get through a text, or give up halfway through a book, it is likely that they have not understood enough of the words to gain meaning from what they have read*.
Build children's vocabulary and we build their stamina - simple. Take the difficulty out of any task and it becomes easier to continue. Imagine a run without aching legs or panting breath - we'd all be out pounding the pavements! But while we can't hope to teach children every word in the dictionary, we can teach them strategies to cope. As an adult you have them, you just may not notice you’re using them. Read an unfamiliar word and you will automatically decode it, blend it, dig out the root word and derive meaning from familiar sounding contexts. Wouldn’t it be great if children did that automatically too?
Exposing children to varied text types, characters, settings, story arcs and non-fiction writing means they begin to understand how literature and language ‘work’. But what if they could learn subject-specific vocabulary along the way? Even better, apply words across contexts. If you’re familiar with our planning sequences, you’ll already know about activities like shades of meaning and prefix pelmanisms. While also being a bit of fun, this type of activity can show children how words relate to others and how the meaning of a word can often derive from the sum of its parts. Other useful tricks to have stored up your sleeve might include word association games, matching, sorting, drawing and etymology exploration. Anything that creates that ‘stickability’. The tricky part is getting children to apply these things when they read independently…
Luckily they have you. And your superpower is modelling. If children can see you working to define words within context, working through all the steps you would wish for them to do on their own, and if they can see you doing this again and again and again, it will become the norm. Before long you’ll be rejoicing in those moments when you catch children doing it for themselves. Hurrah!
So next time you’re planning a sequence of reading lessons, spare a thought for the teaching of vocabulary. Read the text through… Are there any words within it that children will definitely need to know the meaning of if they are going to understand the text as a whole? If the answer is yes, how are you going to teachthe meaning of these words? How do they relate to other words you’ve looked at recently? And how are you going to make them stick? The bottom line is that reading is all about words, but understandingthem is key.
*Disclaimer: older children reading within an ‘age-appropriate interest level’ may have developed enough of a reading repertoire to know that they are just not getting on with a book, and that’s ok too.
Posted in: Curriculum
