Term 1 reader profile survey

 Conducting the Reader Profile Survey was a real eye-opener in many ways.

The first, a complete tangent but thought-provoking... was the responses to the question "School Name". More than one quarter (10/38) of students responded by the name that they are called at school! It begs the question of whether this occurs in forms and surveys where we don't necessarily delve into the data. This is an accidental but interesting observation of their comprehension of the question.

I was heartened to find that the majority of our learners like reading at school:

This is particularly interesting because their previous experience of the way reading is taught will be drastically different, depending on the class they were in last year. Some will have experienced a multimodal approach, with agency over topic or theme. Others will have been in a more traditional setting with a reading group and specific text. Some will have had a formal structured literacy approach. It will be interesting to reflect back, later in the year, with the same question.

Given that there is specified time set aside daily for Silent Reading... it was alarming to find that more than half of the class were not currently reading a book for enjoyment. It is an expectation that is clearly declarative but not functional knowledge!

So now what?

• I am taking the books, genres, and topics that they have highlighted as enjoying and requesting an order from the National Library.
• I intend to encourage students to promote books that they enjoy so others may learn from them. A large problem seems to be that the learners don't know what they like.
• I need to start modelling silent reading with the learners. It's something I used to do, but this fell by the wayside as the time became utilised for other admin tasks.
• I need to develop my understanding of what girls read. As a Mum of three boys, & a girl that likes the same books asher brothers did, I'm like a fish out of water with making recommendations beyond Thea Stilton!