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Why Kaleidoscope?By Cliff Moon
If children are exposed to the best books at every stage of learning to read as they develop into independent readers,
then they are more likely to form positive attitudes to reading and to carry on reading in later life. Good reading
experiences at school make readers for life. Margaret Meek has always emphasised that "what the beginning reader reads
makes all the difference to his/her view of reading."
It fascinates me that national testing, from the outset, has judged children's reading fluency on their ability to read
'trade' books, not reading scheme books. If you use a scheme or you mix-and-match reading schemes, you also need 'trade'
children's books alongside them so that children become familiar with books in the real world - those they can borrow from
libraries or buy from bookshops.
HMI reported in 1990 that schools with high standards in reading invariably structured their resources into levels of
difficulty across a range of books. Recent research indicates that progress in reading is strongly associated with teachers
providing a slightly challenging read - the kind of skill you can practise when your resources have been pre-selected into
difficulty bands. The ‘slightly challenging’ criterion derives from the psychologist Vygotsky's zone of proximal development
- optimum learning occurring when a task is pitched just beyond the child’s current level of development. Several researchers
have also revealed that one of the characteristics of successful learning (to read) is the classroom provision of
'slightly challenging' reading material.
The NLS Framework for Teaching (1998 p.2) states that:
"In the early stages, pupils should have a carefully balanced programme of guided reading from books of graded
difficulty, matched to their independent reading levels."
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How should I use Kaleidoscope?
What has been said leads to the idea of ‘bookmatch’, which enables teachers to slightly challenge each child with the demands of a
text at conceptual, syntactic and lexical levels, a notion which has its roots in these three familiar levels of match:
- Independent (1% miscue or 99% accuracy)
- Instructional (5% miscue or 95% accuracy)
- Frustration (10% miscue or 90% accuracy)
Comprehension is below 50% at this undesirable level
So first you need to ascertain which Kaleidoscope colour matches a child’s reading competence and chronological age at the Independent
Level. These are the books the child can read for pleasure or information and which can be taken home for additional reading practice.
During shared or guided reading, you may well introduce texts which the children read at the Instructional Level, thereby providing the
'slightly challenging read'.
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