The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2024 issue - Magazine - Page 34
Would you like to improve
your students’ reading fluency,
vocabulary, and comprehension?
Reading Solutions UK provides
exceptional educational technology
solutions thatimprove outcomes for
schools, educators, and young learners.
They do this through providing the online
adaptive reading development programme,
Dreambox Reading Plus. The software:
• Accelerates reading growth.
• Closes the reading gap.
• Encourages reluctant readers.
• Reduces teacher workload.
Starting Reading Plus with a clear, logical,
and well-specified plan is the key to
sustainable and scalable programme
implementation. Schools will have a
bespoke implementation plan personalised
for your students and a structured staff
training plan.
How does Reading Plus support fluency
and improve inefficient reading?
Students who need to develop their reading
fluency typically see text presented using
the patented Reading Plus Guided Window.
Reading Plus uses the Guided
Window to support the
development of reading
fluency. This scaffolds the
reading experience by guiding
the reader’s eyes left-to-right
across a page utilising a
moving box. The speed is
specific to each student and
increases when the student
demonstrates mastery.
Meet student Arun
Arun is behind year-level
expectations in reading.
He is a slow reader, and because of this, he
struggles with his stamina. His slow pace,
poor stamina, and low vocabulary mean he
doesn’t enjoy reading.
In September, Arun’s school purchased
Reading Plus to help improve students’
fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Reading Plus is an online adaptive reading
development programme. It is designed to
accelerate reading progress and close the
reading gap.
Arun uses Reading Plus for 3 x 30-minute
sessions each week
During these sessions, Arun completes
five reading and one vocabulary task each
week to develop his reading skills and word
knowledge.
Students can take control and maintain
accountability for their progress as they can
see their reading progress and goals at a
glance within their own dashboard.
This scaffold changes how
students approach the text
while gradually and effectively
increasing the rate at which
they can read it with good comprehension
and stamina.
This moving box, which guides Arun’s eyes
across a page of text bespoke to his reading
speed, will develop his fluency and stamina
Arun has access to over 1200 ageappropriate texts
The texts are 500-2,500 words and test their
deeper understanding with ten questions
after each selection. Each lesson can be
completed in 15 minutes, and students can
see their scores instantly.
The eight text categories students will encounter when using Reading Plus are:
• Personal Journey.
• Earth.
• Heroes & Trailblazers.
Each text includes rigorous questions in
various formats to test comprehension skills.
Critical year-appropriate academic
vocabulary is seamlessly incorporated into
every text.
As Arun advances through the programme,
he encounters a staircase of steadily
increasing vocabulary complexity and
sentence length, ensuring that he engages
with appropriate texts for his reading ability.
By May, Arun’s reading skills improved
through regular use of Reading Plus.
How does Reading Plus support
teachers?
Reading Plus supplies easy-to-access
data-driven reports, supporting planning
for leaders and teachers.
Teacher workload is reduced as they can
spend less time planning and more time
teaching with the help of:
• Diagnostic data on individual students to
understand their current reading level, skills
requiring improvement (such as fluency or
comprehension), and strengths.
• Printable interventional materials (lesson
plans and worksheets) linking to specific
reading domains to use with a small group
or as a one-to-one intervention.
• Searchable resources from tutorial videos
to printable resources.
Try a free pilot to test its impact.
Reading Solutions UK offer schools,
multi-academy trusts, and local authorities
the option to try Reading Plus for free, as
we believe it is essential that decisions to
implement new programmes are made on
three factors - impact, sustainability, and
scalability.
“Most students we trialled Reading Plus with
were in the lowest category available, and
quite a few came on in leaps and bounds.
This was with only 30 minutes per week.
On average, our students completed two
reading and two vocabulary tasks per week.
So it was a mammoth task for any progress,
yet we still saw excellent engagement and
good progress.” – Yan Parson, SEN
Coordinator, Heartlands Academy.
• How Things Work.
For more information about Dreambox
Reading Plus or to try a free four-week
pilot, please:
• Call 0191 389 6078.
• Time Machine.
• Email info@readingsolutionsuk.com
• Get in the Game.
•Visit www.readingsolutionsuk.com
• Mystery & Adventure.
• Art & Culture.