Rachel Holden, Parkland School, Palmerston North
I have been teaching for 17 years from secondary English to primary and found teaching Year 3 in 2006 highlighted my real passion for teaching was at the primary level. Like most New Zealand teachers, I taught reading based on guided reading and used essential word lists for spelling. However, there were always students for whom this simply did not work and my attempt to meet the needs of all my students led me to look into other ways to teach reading and spelling.
My introduction to explicit and systematic teaching was during Lockdown 2020 when my son’s teacher used The Code for spelling during a ZOOM lesson. I started looking forward to these daily Code sessions and soon started teaching it to my Year 1 and 2 class. In those early days, I used The Code to teach spelling in groups. The children’s knowledge grew and they loved learning about patterns - suddenly spelling made sense! Despite this amazing improvement in learning, it was very time-consuming in an already super-tight curriculum.
Combined with the many reading, writing and spelling groups, literacy in my classroom was becoming a slog for both me and the children. I needed help. We reached out for some Literacy Professional Learning and our school started SL PLD in 2023 concentrating initially on teaching spelling across the school. Teachers had highlighted students’ spelling as a concern and the inconsistency of the teaching across the school was also an issue. Once we began the PLD, I successfully changed to whole class teaching of spelling.
Understanding that Explicit Teaching is the most effective and efficient way to teach a novice (and these students are novices when learning to spell) was the game changer for me. While continuing to build our knowledge and refine our delivery of Explicit Teaching I developed a script for our teachers to use as a guide and support. James Dobson in his podcast (Knowledge for Teachers) describes the benefits of using a script, including ensuring teachers’ cognitive load is lessened especially for those staff members at the beginning of their journey of learning, freeing them up to be more responsive to learners, and acknowledging that the script is a stepping stone to developing each teacher’s automaticity of the teaching sequence.
Below is an example of what students write in their Code Book during a lesson. R is Revision, Heart is the new Heart Word, P is the Practice writing words with the new spelling pattern, and A is applying the new learning at the sentence level.
Seeing the success of teaching whole-class spelling for 30 minutes a day, I was keen to continue to maximise my teaching and students' learning. My next goal was reading…
Whole Class Reading 20 mins
Last year after hearing the amazing Mary Brown speak year at SBP in Auckland. on, ‘The Role of Whole Class Teaching - Teaching Knowledge to Strengthen Literacy Learning’ I returned to Palmerston North to my year 2 and 3 class, and immediately put Mary’s whole class reading model into practice.
The texts I chose for whole class reading were non-fiction based on our learning topic. Most of the texts I created were from a website called DIFFIT. For example, when learning about the Manawatu River in Term 4 I searched for a text about eels; our class novel was ‘The Last Bear’, so I chose a text on Polar Bears; our end-of-year trip was to Foxton Estuary so our texts were on the Godwit and then the Raukawa Gecko.
Term One this year our whole class texts were linked to our learning ‘Ko Au Taku Taonga’. We’ve had texts based on the children of our school: taonga, cultural festivals, being bilingual, legend of Okatia, Maui fishing up the North Island, Autumn and ANZAC Day.
This term we’ve been building up our scientific knowledge of stars and star constellations in preparation for Matariki, also learning about polar bears and the archipelago Svalbard, which is where our class novel takes place.
After hearing Mary explain that she uses one text for her whole class reading, I changed to this for my fluency buddies. I had already been experimenting with fluency buddies but using a few different ability-based texts. I took Nathanial Swain’s recommendation of organising readers from highest to lowest to create my fluency buddies. I split that list in half to have two lists and then matched the top with the bottom within each list so there wasn’t an extreme difference in ability between the buddies. Buddy A is the higher reader, Buddy B is the lower reader.
I trained students in the role of a fluency buddy, taught them how to track, support their buddy if they got stuck with a word, and provide appropriate feedback to one another. We spend four days a week on the same text.
Along with fluency, explicitly teaching vocabulary and knowledge to enable comprehension, have been the driving force behind my reading programme. New vocabulary is explicitly taught and meaning is discussed before we read the text. We have rich discussions once the text has been read and all the vocabulary words are added to our ‘vocab wall’ at the end of each week. This ensures these words are always accessible to the students and we can return to them at any time to review them.
Here is an overview of what this looks like:
Monday: introduce vocabulary, define the words and put each word into context orally. I read the text, then students buddy read, Buddy A reads first and then supports Buddy B. I roam the room listening to each reader ensuring that one is reading, one is tracking and all are on task.
Tuesday: recap the vocabulary. I call on students to read and define the vocabulary words. Students buddy read the text and then back to the mat for Choral Reading - we all read the text together.
Wednesday: recap the vocabulary, read and define, Buddy Reading, feedback, then back to the mat for me to start the reading and the students read together to the end of the sentence whenever I pause.
Thursday: students have their whiteboards ready to show their understanding of the new vocabulary. I read a definition and the students write the matching word. I have taught them the routine, ‘write it’, ‘chin it’, ‘read it’, ‘wipe it' and ‘lid it’. This is followed by the final Buddy Reading for the text for that week, final feedback and then back for choral reading to the end of the sentence.
The DIFFIT texts are glued into their Literacy Book which is taken home daily so parents/whanau can support their child and be involved in our class learning. The Literacy Book becomes a wonderful resource for the children and they love going back and reading previous texts. An important note is that the DIFFIT texts have the explicit vocabulary I want to teach the students in the body of the text. There are no illustrations of any sort, I want our students to read the words and eliminate using pictures to ‘guess’.
We break for a 10-minute healthy food snack and during this time I read our class novel to them. I use the recommended novel list by OCHRE https://ochre.org.au/. Last term we read ‘Can You See Me?’ and this term we are reading the sequel to ‘The Last Bear’, ‘Finding Bear’.
Whole Class Handwriting 10 minutes
Before our writing session begins I explicitly teach handwriting, starting with finger and posture exercises. I model and give students plenty of opportunities to practice.
Whole Class Writing 30 mins
We continue with the whole class text for reading from our Literacy Book to inform our writing. I have been implementing the Syntax Project and have explicitly taught sentence structure and the four types of simple sentences. We combine our new vocabulary words and knowledge with the different sentence types. Together we discuss these and write them as a class. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday students respond to questions related to the knowledge from the text.
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After morning tea we have an additional 30 minutes of Literacy where I teach two target groups (tier 2 students on decodable texts), while the rest of the class works on a Must Do linked to our spelling or knowledge focus. A link to my Literacy Plan is here.
Literacy Timetable
2 hours and 25 minutes of Literacy per day
9 hours of Literacy per week
The impact
The impact of whole-class teaching (spelling, reading, vocabulary and writing) on the students has been phenomenal.
students are much more excited about their learning
students are more engaged
students are more independent and able to work closely with a partner
their vocabulary and knowledge of the world have increased immensely
our families have become much more involved in our classroom learning
students are using the new vocab in the playground and in their conversations in the classroom. How delighted was I to hear a year 3 student exclaim rather proudly that we were ‘orbiting’ the playground when we did our fitness run!
our text often lends itself to other curriculum areas such as science and art - we’ve had amazing art pieces.
we’ve even had students so inspired by our class texts and books that they’ve purchased sequels with their own money, and donated it to the class so we can read it! This is a sure sign that this approach is making a massive impact.
Artwork inspired by our whole class learning
Art and Dioramas - Arctic, Polar Bears, Foxton Estuary and the Manawatū River.
Northern Lights, Svalbard and a star artwork.
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