Does Kōtare actually enjoy reading?

 A couple of days ago I conducted a reading survey on my tamariki. I have a mixture of year 4, 5 and 6 students (mainly 5/6) and this years' cohort is at a lower academic level than previous years. They are all eager to please though and despite a choppy start with my attendance at school, they have settled in relatively well.

Getting to know your tamariki is key to their education. Knowing what they like, who they are, what they bring to your kopa is essential and being able to plan around this knowledge needs to be evidence based. This survey via Manaiakalani is one way to get to know who your tamariki are as readers. 

Prior to the survey I thought that my kids would not like reading nor read a lot. The exact opposite of myself. I read before I started school at 5 and read everyday - although the past couple of years had me put down fiction and pick up a lot more text style and science books. I am just getting back into reading fiction after the first day of RPI inspired me.

I had a battle with Google Sheets. As an experienced MS Excel user I find sheets frustrating. To add to that I lost part of my brain with covid two weeks ago and I am sorry to say that I have yet to find parts of it!! I struggled with putting the data into sheets and gave up with some graphs that made a great maths lesson for the kids on reading the results. So a win there as they had to figure out that things weren't in order column wise (and what was a column?) so they had to read carefully. They were fantastic and enjoyed the lesson both from a maths perspective and to learn from the data itself.

Kōtare's Reading Data

The results surprised me. I have one outlier who did skew some results. This tamaiti reads texts books for fun and scores in stanine 9 for everything in his year, and stanine 8 for the year higher. 

6 didn't read anything which was sad, but lower than I thought it would be. They generally fell on the "liked reading at school" side which was a relief, but looking at the individuals who didn't like reading at school it was the poorer readers which I felt for. 

I shared the titles of the books that they had as favourites and several were interested in trying reading the books that the others enjoyed so that was great. I will be starting a recommendation system in class where kids write reviews for others to read with the book and have it on display for others to see and perhaps be inspired to read.

Just under half the class does not have their own library card. Again, I was surprised that it was that high! I am getting forms from our mobile book bus that comes from our city library to school so that others can get one if they wish. I will encourage parents to sign them up. 

I wonder if some filled it in, in such a way in order to please me though. I hope not. These tamariki hunger for attention and love which as a role model for reading, I hope to influence them that reading is awesome and worthwhile.