Moving Beyond Reading Comprehension Sheets

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to present my ideas about Whole Class Reading to a lovely, enthusiastic bunch of teachers and leaders at Reading Rocks. I have blogged before here about my move to Whole Class Reading and why I am such an advocate of this approach over the traditional carousel model.

When I discuss this approach, quite often, I get asked these two questions:

• How do you support lower ability readers?
• What sorts of activities do you do in your whole class sessions without it just being comprehension sheets?

I set out my thoughts on the first question here.

In response to the second question, I always ensure I try to have a range of activities which really embed our DERIC skills, sometimes comprehension questions but quite often a range of other activities.

When we give children comprehension questions, we group them into categories of questions to help the children to become aware of what a retrieval question looks like for example.

But, the last thing we want is death by comprehension questions so…I have experimented with and created lots of other activities which embed these DERIC skills just as well as comprehension questions do. I am now sharing a bank of these activities which link to the DERIC skills in order to support teachers in planning whole class lessons.

I hope they are useful!

Please click on the link below to download a copy:

whole-class-reading-activity-bank