Ready to Read Series
Welcome to The New Zealand Curriculum Update
Curriculum Updates support school leaders and teachers as they work to design and review their school curriculum in line with the New Zealand Curriculum and with current knowledge and understandings about effective classroom teaching.
Curriculum Updates are published in the Education Gazette and are available online.
This Update describes some outcomes of the review of Ready to Read and the Junior Journal, including the text-levelling process. Learn about the thinking behind the series and how it supports your teaching and the needs of your students.
In their first three years at school, students need to build a strong foundation in literacy to enable them to become confident, competent, lifelong readers and writers. Ready to Read and the Junior Journal (the two core instructional series for students in years 1–3) help them to do this. They support students to develop “effective reading processing systems” as they learn to respond to and think critically about increasingly complex texts.
Shared and guided reading
Shared and guided reading are two of the instructional approaches that lead to independence in reading. Ready to Read shared reading texts have memorable language and literary content that is above the level that students can initially access by themselves. However, after multiple shared readings of a big book, students become able to read the accompanying small book independently. (See the 21 November 2011 issue of the Education Gazette for a full discussion of shared reading.)
Guided reading texts are introduced after students have developed some understanding about books and print, developed through activities such as listening to engaging texts read aloud, shared reading, language experience, and writing. Ready to Read and Junior Journal texts for guided reading are designed so that, after a careful introduction by the teacher, students can read and problem-solve their way through them, largely by themselves.