Literacy and Numeracy News

LITERACY NEWS

THE SCIENCE OF READING - AN OVERVIEW

The Science of Reading has been on the radio, across social media, in newspapers and popping up a lot more recently, but what does it really mean? The Science of Reading refers to a vast body of research on learning to read from cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, education, neurology and more. It is the consensus from thousands of empirically supported studies, about how humans learn to read, the skills required, and which parts of the brain are involved in literacy development. Simply, it is the best research that we know on how we learn to read and how we can support all of our students to read. 

At SMPPS, we have already been incorporating many elements of the Science of Reading into our literacy curriculum, such as our structured synthetic phonics approach and our explicit teaching. This year with our AIP goal focused on reading, we have been diving into ways we can strengthen this practice, through the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope. 

The Simple View of Reading is the equation: 

Word Recognition x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension 

The multiplication sign is present because when something is multiplied by zero, the answer is zero. If our students can’t decode, or if they don’t understand the vocabulary, or sentence then at least one side of the equation is 0 and the students aren’t comprehending what they read. 

Scarborough’s Reading Rope allows us to unpack the subsets and skills of Word Recognition and Language Comprehension, and how they weave together as we become increasingly strategic and automatic to become skilled readers. Over the term, we will share with you elements of the reading rope and how you can support these skills at home. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO AT HOME: 

• Understand that reading is a complicated process that requires decoding and language comprehension to construct meaning from a text. 
• Encourage children to decode through sounding out and blending, instead of guessing the word. 
• Read a range of texts with and to your child, including high quality literature. 
• Model your thinking aloud when reading to show how you are building your understanding. 
• Discuss texts, literature, words, phrases and idioms, including what you like and connections you made to yourself, other texts and the world.  
• Build strong background knowledge and vocabulary for your child, by learning about the world around them. 

HOME READERS

At SMPPS in Grade 1 and 2, we are transitioning away from levelled readers to decodable readers for home reading. The decodable readers will be categorised into phases instead of levels, which will be based on the students letter-sound knowledge and their ability to apply their knowledge when decoding words. This change is based on the Science of Reading, and the importance of helping students to succeed in reading by learning how to decode accurately. We still encourage children and families to borrow and read a range of literature and texts from the SMPPS Library, the local library and from the books they have at home, to ensure that high-quality and diverse literature are read, discussed, analysed and treasured.