A teaching tool that’s an absorbing read

Introduction

“Reading is fundamental to what we do in terms of early intervention,” explains Richard Slade, Executive Head of Plumcroft Primary School in Greenwich. “We put a phenomenal amount of energy from nursery through to Year 1 to get the mechanistic part of reading embedded very quickly. By the time they're six years old, our children can read unfamiliar words quickly because they're secure phonetically. Once every child is a competent mechanical reader, you can then spend a lot of energy on reading for meaning.” 

Plumcroft is a large and very successful school in an area of London that has high deprivation. “We are a five-form entry school with over 1,000 pupils from the age of three to 11, about 35% of whom are on free school meals. Lots of our children just read and read and love it. But we've got a significant number of children, probably at least half the school population, who don't have those habits of sustained reading. We put a lot of energy in to get them to stick at it so that they absorb and get into that depth of meaning.” 

myON plays a key part in delivering that sustainability, which became clear during the pandemic. myON is a cross-curricular teaching and learning tool that helps students acquire the essential reading skills they need to become fluent readers. Based on a digital library of over 7,000 high-quality, culturally diverse texts, myON provides an easy way to ensure these skills are practised in real time in the classroom and then developed further at home.  

As Richard points out, the fundamental problem with just allowing children to access texts online without direction is that it often results in “butterfly reading” – they would start a book, not engage with it, or finish it and flit to the next. “That sustained reading habit just wasn’t there,” he says. “You need to get children to engage. A lot of online resources fall down because there is no directional guidance – hence the butterfly effect, you read the headlines rather than the content.” 

But myON allows teachers to see how many books are started, how many are finished and how long it’s taken them to read. “The data is incredibly good. During the pandemic, we knew what children were reading, when they were reading, how long they were reading for and, more importantly, when they weren't reading. We collated the data at a whole school, class and at pupil level, so that we could be strategic about it and so teachers could see the level of engagement.” 

Appropriate texts

Another key factor is that myON allows teachers to pitch texts to the appropriate reading ability of the student. “The books within a project can be differentiated by reading ability, so teachers are able to identify a range of texts appropriate for individual children. Even to the extent that if there is an older child who still struggles to read for meaning and depth, there are books that look as if they're for older children, but the language content is a lot easier, so they don’t feel as if they're reading a beginner’s book.” 

myON’s multi-media functions also allow children to respond to what they are reading in a variety of ways, not just the written word. “During the pandemic, children produced PowerPoint presentations, videos, audio files and stop-frame animations. I mean, who knew that 10-year-old kids could do stop-frame animation?”

This in turn, motivates the children to engage and explore the subject in greater depth. “They quickly realise that to do the project well, they have to read more. And the more texts they read, the more sustained their reading becomes.”