[Coaching Pupils] Coaching Improves Reading for 7 Year Olds in Primary School in just 6 x 15 min Sessions

I worked with another child and she wanted to read up a book band level, from ‘turquoise’ to ‘orange’, and her ‘baseline’ when we started was:

• She was sounding out most words when she was reading.
• She had no expression, and she only knew 17 out of the 44 Year 2 words on sight.
• And she really relied on picture clues when she was reading.

After coaching…

• She’d moved from ‘turquoise’ to ‘orange’ level, and then to ‘purple’ level, so she exceeded what she thought she was going to do!
• She reads fluently and independently with 85% accuracy now.
• She uses expression to speech marks, exclamation marks, and question marks, and she can read all of the common exception words on sight.
• And she now is starting to look at the text to clarify answers rather than just looking at the pictures to see if she can guess what the answer is.

So, they were really big steps in terms of her original progress.

In terms of her attitude towards it, her concentration and her focus, have really, really improved.

And she thought of a lot of things that she wanted to do. She wanted to put words on iPad so that she could read them and practise them.

It really was all HER ideas – although you had all these ideas in your head that

you wanted to tell her!

No, it was her ideas, and she now enjoys reading, which is really fundamentally great as far as I’m concerned.

Her mother is having treatment for cancer, so she’s in and out of hospital and she is back and forth with grandma and so on.

Mum used to email me or – well, she still does – She emails me every week and she says how her daughter’s been motivated to carry out the tasks that she’s decided to do on her own, and not being ‘adult-dependent’ at home.

So, she said she is really pleased with how she’s developed her own independence in developing her reading skills when mum’s not around, if that makes sense.

Thank you.

(clapping)

– Can I run away now?

(laughs)

[Interviewer] Could I just ask you, how old…

– She’s seven.

– [Interviewer] Wow!

– Yeah, she’s seven.

[Monica (Headteacher)]: That’s amazing! …So when somebody says to you that you can’t coach an NQT because they haven’t got the experience – it’s got to be ‘mentoring’, just tell them “Rubbish! If a seven-year-old child can be coached…”

– Yeah, I’ve got a little boy who I do as well for reading, who’s seven, and he hated reading at the beginning!

Didn’t read at home, didn’t do anything…

And now, he’s got somebody else who hears him read daily because he doesn’t read at home.

But now, he’s like, “Can I read to you?”

So he’s reading twice a day to people, and he’s asking to read.

And so it has had an impact on attitude.

– [Interviewer] Fantastic! That’s amazing. Well done you!

Thank you.