Teacher blog – delivering the Think2Read programme

Year 2 teacher, Shannele Cowban

Year 2 teacher, Shannele Cowban

Think2Read’s Comprehension Skills ‘Reading Mission’ programme

Module 1 in Year 2, St. Marys and St. Peters Catholic Primary School

The children have completed module 1 and have really enjoyed the activities that they had to do in each session. The literal patroller’s focus on who, where and what within in each text helped the children to develop an understanding of what to look for as a reader in order to gain an understanding of the text. They are starting to apply this to their home reading books and library books.

The focus on who, where and what has been transferable into their writing as when story planning they now know that these are the 3 key questions they need to think about before constructing a plan.

As the module progressed the children had to start writing their own questions about who was in the text, what they were doing and where. This really helped the children to practise the use of question marks, which is something that can often have a limited role within their own writing. The module had a definite impact on the sentence structure of the Year 2 class as they became familiar with the patterns and structure of the language, realising that sentences starting with who, what and where would be questions. The children scored more on the writing questions element of the assessment this time than they did in September.

Within the group sessions it became clear that some of the roles such as challenger were being taken on by children who had not been given this role. The children have become more comfortable with discussion and debate throughout the module and as such we have lost the rigidity of the roles where one child is responsible for one element. The majority of children are challenging, caring or wanting to report without being prompted to or without being assigned this role. As this enthusiasm is a positive thing, the roles are being changed faster than anticipated simply due to the way the children are responding to the sessions and sometimes the roles are more like elements that we consider as a group rather than assigning them to a specific person.

The children now have a good understanding of literal retrieval and we are looking forward to moving on to predictions in module 2.