The Rhythm for Reading blog
All posts tagged 'reading-fluency'
Starting a new school year: Mixed ability group teaching
1 September 2015The energy of a new school year is incredibly positive and also very demanding. Some students will begin the term refreshed, starting the year with high aspirations, new stationery in their new school bags, whereas others will have anxiety or feel angry that the work ahead of them will be even more difficult to understand than it was the year before. Many will look forward to seeing classmates again, but socially less well-adjusted children, will dread a return to taunts and jibes and loneliness.
Many will be beginning the new school year with the best of intentions, wanting to please teachers, trying to organise themselves with greater success than before and to contribute in lessons. Some will lack motivation, and for complex reasons, will continue to struggle, as despite everyone’s best efforts, the school system does not really help them.
I am frequently inspired by children who do not understand what they read, but trust that with more reading practice, their experience of reading will become more rewarding. Unfortunately, practising reading as a decoding skill is not going to help them to achieve fluency and comprehension. Unless word recognition skills are integrated with the child’s speech and understanding of language, for example, through a reading intervention, a profound disconnection between these processes will persist.
Equally inspiring for me, are the teachers and classroom practitioners who are faced with the enormous task of teaching children with extraordinarily wide-ranging attitudes to learning. I see wonderful group teaching in classrooms week after week, year after year. We really should celebrate that we have such a high calibre workforce in our schools.
There are new case studies on our website, illustrating how the Rhythm for Reading programme continues to support teachers in resolving the difficulties that children experience with reading fluency and comprehension. Click the link to read more.
The Power of Music – Reflections
15 February 2015The Power of Music - a research synthesis of the impact of actively making music on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people, by internationally renowned Professor Susan Hallam MBE, University College London, Institute of Education was published at the end of January 2015. The review brings together more than 600 scholarly publications, which provide compelling evidence of the positive effect of music on literacy, numeracy, personal and social skills to support the argument for the inclusion of music in the education of every child and young person.
Music, more than any other discipline consists of ways of doing things (techniques and methods) and ways of being (empathy, intention, style etc). Perhaps, the most important of these is how to listen well. Children, immersed in their family and home environment from pre-birth to school age, have learned nearly everything they know about their language and culture through listening. A high quality musical education develops listening far beyond the everyday level by enhancing and deepening communication; it also refines physical coordination skills far beyond what can be achieved through sport. The unique combination of these elements contributes immensely to pupil well-being and to learning.
The value of a high quality musical education in primary school, consisting of the integration of listening skills with singing, physical coordination and notation reading skills cannot be overstated. As musicians we have a huge responsibility to equip primary teachers with great tools, and training of the highest quality so that they feel confident, secure and empowered in this exciting and creative role. Through the Rhythm for Reading programme, with access to our group teaching methods and with all the tools and training that we have developed, all primary teachers can deliver a high quality musical education, bring the power of music into their classrooms and witness the profoundly vibrant effects of music education on reading fluency, listening skills and much more.
A few words on the subject of rhythm
12 October 2014
Whether chanting slogans, learning times tables, conjugating verbs, memorising telephone numbers or reciting poetry, the chances are that most people have at some point relied on their sense of rhythm to memorise units of information. The regular beat underpinning a rhythmic pattern generates a stable framework, pulling discrete units of information together into chunks that are more easily remembered. The regular beat is as predictable (and cyclical) as the sound of waves breaking on the shore. However, the presence of rhythm in our everyday lives is relatively subtle, particularly where language is concerned. This may be because our perception of time is predominantly linear in terms of having a past, present and future or in terms of structure, a beginning, middle and end. We make linear arrangements of words on a page and are usually fixated on the end point – debating how effective and how satisfactory the resolution might be.
Both the process of reading in order to learn and the sense of reading with ease and fluency and understanding that we experience when reading for pleasure are little understood by researchers, but the role of rhythm is key, as the Rhythm for Reading blog will explain in the posts that follow.