Reading at Key Stage 2

Teaching reading at Key Stage 2
What goes on in our heads when we read?

An institution-based session designed to enable student teachers to recognise that reading is an active creative process

Your teaching strategies (Geekie, Cambourne and Fitzsimmons, 1999).

Select an extract from a challenging KS2 text e.g. the beginning of Fire, Bed and Bone (Branford, 1997). Using an OHT or IWB uncover the text of the first paragraph, sentence by sentence. As you do so, jot down what is going on inside your head i.e. articulate your reading processes as a model for the student teachers. This can be a good point to introduce the idea of reading journals.

The student teachers then continue reading from individual copies, trying to do the same thing. Those who have studied literature at A level usually find it very hard to avoid giving a literary critical response, but this is not what is needed.

In pairs or small groups they then compare their responses, first informally, and then in the light of these cognitive processes. How many have they used in their search for meaning and how aware are they of the way they bring their own experiences of life and other texts read and seen to this process?

If needed, prompt them to see how these mental processes help to create the secondary world of the text (Benton and Fox, 1985).

Collate and record their findings from this exercise to use as reference material in later sessions.

Try the same exercise with poetry (which many students fear!) or an information text for KS2. Use Guidelines for analysis of non-fiction texts. This can also be a non-contact paired task
This approach is also useful for Shared reading in school.