Castletown Girls' School have had Reading Recovery in operation for a number of years. We currently have two teachers trained to offer the programme. It is a research based intervention programme with the Primary goals of accelerating literacy learning and reducing reading and writing failure difficulties by targeting children who may need support in senior infants or 1st class. 

The programme was developed in New Zealand by educator and psychologist Marie Clay, who used evidence from her intensive research and observations of good classroom practices to develop Reading Recovery. 

Reading Recovery:

• Identifies students experiencing reading and writing difficulties after their first year of school.
• Provides an intensive, individually designed and delivered series of one to one lessons for 30 minutes each day.
• Is supplementary to the ongoing literacy activities in the classroom. 

A Reading Recovery teacher has intense, specialised training to identify exactly what a child finds difficult about reading and writing. 

The lessons are based on what a child needs and the teacher ensures the child is successful in their learning. Each child receives an individual 30 minute lesson daily in which they read two familiar books, reread yesterday's book and complete a running record , complete a letter sort, do word work, have an oral discussion, write a self composed message, complete a cut up sentence and read a new book.

With careful observation and expert teaching the teacher makes decisions about future lessons and the child's needs. 

Reading Recovery is an early intervention programme to prevent reading and writing struggles. 

Levelled readers are used throughout the school. The PM series is the core scheme
used but is also supplemented by The Oxford reading scheme and The Big Cats
guided readers.

Ensuring children are placed on an appropriate instructional level (teaching level) of reading is of utmost importance. Children are placed on levelled readers and placed into
reading groups in each class level. Teachers assign books for the specific needs of
their students in these reading groups.

Running records are used to ascertain that children are reading books of an appropriate instructional level and results school wide are monitored. 

Familar reading (books previously read) are practiced to enhance fluency and are sent home for homework. Fluency, phrasing and expression are key to comprehension
and rereading of books many times is an essential practice.

In Junior Infants children will begin on decodable readers and quickly move to PM
levelled readers.

Word solving strategies (chunking- what part do you know? What
small word can you see? using visual information, meaning and syntax etc.), concepts of print and high frequency words from readers will be taught and teachers will model and teach fluency and phrasing from the beginning of reading instruction.
(Children are discouraged from relying solely on ‘sounding it out’ when it
comes to an unknown word as they progress through the levels).

Best practice dictates that children read familiar books (two levels below their
instructional level) at home. Instructional texts will be read in school during reading
groups.

Children who read all 30 PM levels will read novels during guided reading sessions in class.