St. Aengus N.S. is a reading recovery accredited school.

Reading recovery is for children, aged between 5 years 9 months and 6 years 6 months, who need help with reading and writing. Early intervention will make a big difference to a child’s learning.

Children engage in individualised lessons with a specialist teacher for 30 minutes daily. Lessons are designed for each child, based on moment-by-moment observations and skilled teacher decisions, building on what the child already knows.

The goal is for children to become effective and efficient language and literacy learners, able to work within an average range of classroom performance.

Our reading recovery teacher in St. Aengus N.S. is Ms. Monaghan. She has been fully trained for several years and is constantly updating her professional development in Reading Recovery.

Please contact Ms. Monaghan if you wish to find out more information or visit www.pdst.ie/primary/literacy/reading-recovery

Literacy lift off

‘Literacy Lift-Off’, is an intensive programme of Reading and Writing, which gives our pupils lots of opportunities to read books at their own level of competency. It gradually lifts the complexity of what they can do in both reading and writing by equipping them with the necessary problem-solving skills.

The aim of Literacy Lift-Off is to make our pupils constructive learners. It teaches them ‘how’ to problem-solve independently.

We implement this programme in blocks of 6 weeks. Diverse activities are essential for extending literacy processing power. Hence, the pupils work in ‘stations’ to carry out a number of activities in reading and writing, under the guidance of their teacher and a team of Special education teachers. The programme uses specially graded readers.

Our Stations/Activities work as follows:

Station 1: Familiar Reading
Pupils read previously seen readers.

Purpose: Development of enjoyment, fluency, comprehension and speed.

Station 2: Word Work and Phonics
They use magnetic letters on the whiteboard to make and break words. They also work on their phonics and phonological awareness in this station.
Purpose: To show children how words work, so that they can make a fast visual analysis of their reading.

Station 3: Writing
Pupils write sentences based on their own experiences, using words that they encounter in their readers.
Purpose: That they will learn how they can write their own messages by hearing and recording sounds in words, using analogy and learning unusual words

Station 4: New Reading
Encountering new texts each day challenges the pupils to discover new ways to go beyond their current operating ability and lift their literacy processing.
Purpose: Pupils learn to use strategic activities to read new texts.