 We've been thinking a long time about how do we best develop kids' strategic independent processing when they're reading and writing. And one of the things we'd notice is some children were perhaps not being independent, they were queuing into other students and we wanted all our students to have that belief that they were problem solvers and could read strategically and independently. We'd seen some things that we weren't happy with, children coming through at the end of red-yellow, even further whose concepts about print were kind of incorrect that they thought that it was just memorising or listening to your buddy. When you have a guided reading group and they're all sitting in a circle around you, we get children who just tag off the person who's good in that group and repeat exactly what's being said. So they get through the reading without ever having to attempt any strategy at difficulty. Eli and your partner in crime Cameron, you two, are going to come and read with me. So we started to shift these children outwards so away from each other and go to the reading over the shoulder or the teacher going over the shoulder and the children reading independently. So you said to me, you've read this before but you haven't, have you? No, I haven't. Yeah, so it's similar to one that you've seen before. Who are the people in the book? Granddad and William. Granddad and William and they were in the AirMuffs book as well, weren't they? So if it's a new book, we would introduce it with a short introduction on the cover page. You certainly wouldn't see a teacher going page by page through a book and explaining all the tricky words or interesting phrases. What you would see is a quick introduction enough to enable the students to access the text and the teachers know their learners very well and they know what's going to challenge their learners and what will support their learners. How does that start? Mmm, you know lots of words now that start with W. I try and have one ear on what's going on and whether I can hear just a consistent reading or if they've gone quiet. I'm doing like a mini running record as they go along, seeing what they do at era. What's tripping them up? What are their strategies when they get stuck? Are they using meaning? Do they know the chunks to try and break it up? Yeah, let's go from here because this was after Korol told her about the stars, wasn't it? I'm looking for fluency, I'm looking for what does the child do at difficulty. I'm looking for the strategies that they are using, the strategies that they're not using that perhaps they should be using and if the book is obviously too hard then we would go back or have another book. Does it make sense? I'm still doing the same teaching but I'm teaching them individually within a group so they're getting taught to their individual needs and their next learning steps and so what I'm trying to do when I move around the groups is notice where one child might be making an error at one word or another child might be doing something completely different and so it's a case of teaching them all what they need to do to move on. If they are still beginning readers, magenta, they will stay at the desk and we would be looking for that one to one in directionality. Soon as they hit around about red 2, red 3, they are reading independently but still quite close to each other and close to me. You can come around here further Cameron for me please. As we go up through the levels then we go further away from each other and I circulate. The children who are in the higher levels know when they get to difficulty and they've tried a number of strategies they will come to me and they have their finger on the word so we will then work through it with them. Where are you stuck Kayla? Okay so go from the start and see if we can fix it up. By and large honesty has not been a problem they've been pretty good. Perfect, thank you. We don't do children who first start at school because we want to support them so they have a very clear idea of what reading is about and reading is about looking and it's about attending to meaning and it's about solving problems to get to the meaning and kids have to have some basic understanding of that. They also need to know some of the nuts and bolts like which way to go and the difference between words and letters some of those really key early literacy understandings so we have to wait till that's in place. I periodically try to do running records during my reading groups because it makes sense to get it done during reading time and I use that to decide whether a text is too hard or too easy or whether that child's ready to move on or just to document what they're doing at era. I also have a couple of children who find a running record as a testing tool, quite stressful. So doing that within the whole class situation takes some of that testing anxiety out of the situation as well I think. We really just jumped straight into it and it seemed to be seamless. The children enjoyed doing it because suddenly they were able to read at their own pace. Suddenly they were able to independently try strategies on their own without some nodal kid actually doing it before they were able to do the thinking and so it actually worked into our reading programme very quickly and easily. I don't remember any issues. I just said today we're going to read on the floor. They're very adaptable, they were fine. The key thing is the belief that students are quite capable of solving their own problems of using their skills flexibly and independently provided they've been taught the skills that they bring a base knowledge to the task and provided they've been set up for success. Are you going to catch the words for me? Are you ready? I have no doubt that this independence feeds into these children becoming self-regulated learners in other areas. So they're very keen to cope on their own. Fantastic, good work. I think the children got to a level and then basically stopped. So we'd probably say about blue is when it got all too hard and getting them from blue to green became a real issue. Now the children who've gone through this process right from the word go have progressed pretty quickly actually and we do have evidence for that. 80% of our year 1s get to standard so we'll be looking at that 20% and what can we do for them.