Reading during online learning

From my vast selection of posts on my blog about reading, it felt right to acknowledge ways to approach reading during online learning. While there are lots of ways to teach reading in this circumstance, I will list below the route I’ve taken in hope to give you some ideas with regards to your reading lessons.

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Read aloud to them

Whether it’s a live lesson or a pre-recording of you reading, don’t let online learning take away the joy of sharing a book together. It really can develop comprehension skills and oral language too. Not to mention the sheer enjoyment and excitement that goes along with it.

Do the voices. Make it feel like it does in school and you’re bound to have them engaged.

Make reading part of the daily activities

If it’s not assigned, the chances are, the majority of them won’t read. If you’re engaging in live lessons, you could read a few pages from a book online and leave the children on a cliff hanger. Later that day, link them to that book to finish off by themselves as part of an activity that day. There are LOADS of fantastic books on Epic in which you could do that with.

It’s free at the moment and allows you to see how many hours/minutes your class are reading individually.

Create a group discussion around reading

There’s nothing quite like a group discussion in class to get children engaged in a story. By bringing this element to reading online, it will definitely increase children’s motivation to read. Whether you’re using Seesaw or Google classroom, set up an activity like this:

Children LOVE to disagree and agree with others in the class. Once done respectfully, can make for really good enhancement of reasoning and comprehension skills. Not to mention tapping into group work too, which is pretty difficult during online learning.

Putting in a controversial opinion yourself could be a way to start off the discussion too.

Use interactive stories to mix it up

Vooks is a fantastic streaming site for books for kids. Similarly to what was said above, you could send the children a link to an interactive, animated story on Vooks and create a group discussion on the book over on their learning platform.

It adds a different element to their reading lessons too. They can watch the story come to life, before engaging in discussions with their classmates later in the day.

Ask questions and provide sentence stems

What often happens when asked a question about a text is, children are unsure of how to start off their answer, leading to disengagement. By providing them with the sentence stem, they will feel more confident in engaging with questions in a group forum type style like above.

Choose 1 or 2 questions to ask in this group discussion to really enrich the discussion. Quality over quantity ever day of the week. Assigning multiple questions would take away from the rich discussion among the group.

Please feel free to download these reading support cards. They could be used to help children form their answers in these group discussions. Download them here for FREE.