Reading for Inspiration, Success and Enjoyment – RISE

Reading well means that you will succeed in many areas of your life, including all of your school subjects. You will be able to understand characters and situations that may inspire you. You may also enjoy using your reading skills to explore these new experiences and doing well in life is enjoyable!

RISE to the challenge!

What is ‘RISE’?

• ‘RISE’ is the name of the time in school where students listen to a story being read aloud to them by the teacher, it takes place during form times at least twice a week.
• Students in the same year group all read the same book.
• Each student has their own copy of the book but the important part of these sessions is that they are listening to and following the story.

Why do we have ‘RISE’?

An overview

Let’s start by thinking about the purpose of reading aloud. Reading aloud provides all sorts of academic and cultural advantages to students.
They learn new words, greater knowledge about the world and allows them to visit places and situations that otherwise they never would – it’s a kind of telepathy or time travel and gets us inside minds and places – but only if you know how to and can do it. So, reading aloud doesn’t solve the decoding problem but it does mean that when we read aloud to our students, their reading ability is not a barrier to their understanding and so they can still understand and appreciate the texts we are reading to them. This is addressing situations in the past where they have had a negative experience of having to read independently with high stakes of failure, these sessions are just listening to a story.

Finer Details

Being read aloud to addresses a number of reading points:

• Too many children will not read independently because they are not fluent decoders. They get to the end of a section in a book and cannot recall the beginning because of this.
• This is through no fault of their own: there is no link between decoding (word recognition skills) and intelligence.
• Reading confers all sorts of intellectual advantages: it is proven that the more you read the more intelligent you will become
• We can overcome some of the gap between fluent and non-fluent readers by reading aloud (this won’t address reading fluency, but it will provide non-fluent readers with the intellectual benefits of reading).
• Overcoming fluency is a separate issue which is being addressed on an individual basis.

Also:

• Being read to can make kids cleverer
• Reading aloud may be the most effective way to close the advantage gap.
• And most importantly – Everyone loves stories!