Once children are more confident and independent  readers  they will move from the Read, Write, Inc. reading programme and will begin to read novels.  When they are reading in their group they will take responsibility for a variety of roles.  These are

Clarifier

Summariser

Predictor

Questioner

These roles represent some of the key skills readers should have to enable them to understand the text they are working with.

When the children begin Reciprocal Reading every child in the group usually has the same role.  This allows us to develop their understanding of what they need to do within their reading group and at home.  After the roles are secure each member of the group will have a different job to prepare at night for their next reading session.

In the reading time in class each child will share what they have prepared with their group and they will discuss this together.

At the bottom of this page we have gathered some video clips to show what kind of things we would ask the children to do for homework.

When they start Reciprocal Reading they will bring home a novel and also a Notebook.  The notebook will look like this:

Inside there will be two flaps that can fold out and two different sets of pages within.

The page on the right should be used for making notes to use in the group discussion in school.

This should have a good standard of presentation and care should have been taken over the content.  Here is an example of a page completed by a P3 child:

The flaps on the inside of the covers can be folded out and used when preparing the homework task.

The page on the left hand side of the book looks like this:

 The top section is used by the child to identify which role they have to prepare, what day they have to have it completed by and how many pages or chapters they have to read.

The bottom two boxes are to help the children to continue to improve and to make sure they have completed the task to the best of their ability.  Once they have finished writing up their homework they should fill in the self-evaluation box using the criteria the flaps to help them to see how well they have completed their task.    They should give themselves a colour in the traffic light on the left to identify how well they feel they have achieved.  A red would be used if they have not achieved much within the criteria, orange would be for a task that is almost complete but is perhaps missing a few things and a green would be used if they were confident they had completed the task to the best of their ability and it met the criteria on the flaps.

       

 

           

The Peer evaluation boxes will be completed in class during the group discussion.

What should they be doing if they are a Summariser?

A summariser’s job is to write a summary of the pages they have just read.  It should include the main points and should use good sequential language such as first, next, then and finally.  The summary should include the main points of the summary and should not have lots of small details that don’t really matter in the big picture.

Here are some video clips of children sharing their notes from their summary tasks:

What should they be doing if they are a Clarifier?

A clarifier identifies words from the text that they have found difficult to understand or think others might.  They should write the page number of the page they have taken the word from and a meaning from the dictionary to explain what it means.  Really good clarifiers give an example of what they think the word means, then show what the dictionary has written and finally give the word in a different sentence to show how it can be used in a different way.  A couple fo the video clips below give good examples of this.  Children will be asked to clarify differing number of words depending on what stage of the school they are at.

Here are some video clips of children sharing their notes from their clarifier tasks:

 

What should they be doing if they are a Predictor?

For this job the children will use the clues from the piece of text they have already read to share what they think will happen next.  When they are writing their notes they should share what clues they have used to make their prediction and why they think this is significant.

Here are some video clips of children sharing their notes from their predictor tasks:

What should they be doing if they are a Questioner?

The questioner has to think of at least four questions to ask their group.  Good questions make people think about what they have read and to decide what their opinion would be based upon things they have read.  Questions that ask people to remember facts or just need a yes or no answer are not so good at making us think!  Sometimes children bring home a Question Fan. These have suggestions for how to begin your question to help us when we are thinking about quality questions to ask our group.

                                         

Here are some video clips of children sharing their notes from their questioner tasks: