Literacy

Swanshurst is committed to raising literacy standards across the whole curriculum. Better literacy leads to improved achievements, aspirations and confidence. Our whole-school initiatives support this drive for improvement; oracy skills and the Reciprocal Reading programme are at the heart of literacy at Swanshurst.

Supporting Reading for Information

The ideas here will help raise achievement in any subject area and support Swanshurst’s whole-school literacy objectives.

Useful support to address these demands might include:

Creating a context, which activates and builds relevant knowledge, prior to reading. This might include such activities as brainstorming, group discussion, the use of display which features supporting pictures, diagrams and exemplification, and summarising the main ideas in the text before it is read.

A glossary or some explanation of subject-specific vocabulary.

An opportunity to work collaboratively on the meaning of the text.

The teacher sharing the reading with a whole class demonstrating how to access the text, cope with difficulties and integrate it.

Opportunities to read and have heard such texts before.

Ways of Reading:

Continuous reading

Close reading

Skimming

Scanning

Skimming involves glancing quickly through a passage to get the gist of it – e.g. looking through a newspaper to see what is worth reading or glancing at sub-headings in a book.

Scanning involves searching for a particular piece of information – e.g. looking up a phone number.