We often get asked what reading looks like at school. When teaching children to read, there are many strategies that we use at different times to ensure we engage students with the love of reading. Like at home, it is important for us to connect students with 'hot reads' or books they are interested in. It is also important to expose students to a range of quality literature both fiction and non-fiction. 

A typical reading block at St Michael's would contain some of the following;

Modelled Reading occurs when an teacher reads a difficult text to students, enabling the teacher to model how effective readers sound, solve and think about texts when reading. The “think aloud” strategy is used strategically by the teacher to model thinking and problem solving actions.

Reading Aloud occurs when a teacher reads a difficult text to the students for the purposes of:
    - building a community of readers,
    - creating shared experiences amongst students,
    - exposing students to new ideas, story lines, characters and contexts,
    - exposing students to new vocabulary, text and language structures,
    - building a love of reading.

Shared Reading occurs when a teacher reads a difficult text and students follow the words with their eyes
- provides opportunities for the experienced reader to explicitly teach or demonstrate a strategy or strategic action
- enables the teacher to use the same text for multiple teaching purposes
provides opportunities for students to join in with the teacher to read a hard level text
- involves reading to, with and by students.

Guided Reading occurs when a teacher differentiates reading instruction to suit the needs of learners
- enables a teacher to select a text which matches the specific needs of a small group of students
- enables a teacher to support the small group of students to apply problem solving actions in order to solve the text
- provides opportunities for all students to independently problem solve the text
- provides opportunities for a teacher to revisit the text for particular teaching purposes and monitor student progress

Guided Reading/Reciprocal Teaching occurs when a small group of students work cooperatively to independently problem solve an instructional level text
supports students using the framework
    - predicting
    - reading
    - clarifying
    - questioning
    - summarising

Independent Reading occurs when students independently read easy or familiar texts and enables students to build stamina and apply problem solving actions with greater efficiency and accuracy. 

Please feel free to discuss how you at home can support your child's reading with your child/ren's classroom teacher.