After two years, Sats are back, and with them comes a period of incredibly high pressure for Year 6 teams in schools.
The run-up to Sats is always stressful, but is perhaps heightened this year after the Department for Education announced in March that Ofsted will be using this year’s Sats data to judge schools’ curriculum delivery.
So when it comes to the reading paper, in particular, what can teachers do now to help pupils pick up a few extra marks? Two experienced teachers share their advice.
A walking-talking mock
Matthew Lane, Year 6 teacher at Hethersett VC Primary School, says:
It’s never too late to implement strategies that push pupils to progress that little bit further.
When it comes to the reading paper, I’d recommend a “walking-talking” mock, in which the teacher takes the class through a test paper, explaining the answer and its rationale. This could take up a whole lesson, or be implemented as a starter activity with the teacher reading the text to the class and then working through one or more questions that link with that text.
This method allows pupils to see and understand a “perfect” or “expert” answer to the questions. In this, it’s also important to model how to read and understand the question instructions. Children are usually fine at reading the instructions and can understand the vocabulary, yet get in a muddle with exactly what is required of them.
The second area of focus I’d recommend is teaching children how to skim read. This can be really useful for when they need to quickly find a word within the text for a particular answer.
To begin with, explain that sentences contain a lot of filler that isn’t always necessary to read, such as determiners or conjunctions, and encourage pupils to focus on finding specific keywords or phrases. If looking for the word “butterfly”, for example, they should scan through the text to look for words that begin with “butt”. If they can’t find it after the first scan, they can add letters on, so they are then looking for “butter”. They can also look for words that are the right length, so with “butterfly”, they could look for words that are over 1cm or 8 letters in length.
It can be a fun lesson activity to have children racing to find a given unique word in a text. You will need a longer text to do this, so have texts covering a few sides of A4 as they do in the test.
Finally, I’d urge teachers to remember to look beyond specifically teaching reading and writing skills when it comes to gaining extra marks. Some pupils, for example, can be thrown by seeing a text that’s not in the usual A5ish-size novel because it makes the text appear daunting in its size. Added pictures and different fonts can also make the text layout appear unusual.
To help with this, consciously prepare guided reading resources in different formats. Copy texts onto A4 sheets and aim to use different fonts and in different sizes. Insert pictures to alter the layout or try using columns so there are different topographies to the layouts. If children are used to reading texts in a variety of formats, it’s one less thing that could panic them during the test.
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It’s all about the timing
Rose McDermott, Year 6 teacher and middle leader at Snaresbrook Primary School, says:
The pressure of a timed task gets to all of us, and Year 6 pupils are no exception. When it comes to helping pupils to maximise all 60 minutes of the Sats reading paper, then, there are a few techniques I utilise in the classroom in the weeks running up to the test.
The first is to dispel the myth that they need to read all the text before picking up their pen.
Answering the first few questions as they’re reading the text can really help boost scores, especially with those children who find the time constraint difficult.
Guide them to have the text and the answer sheets open simultaneously and to read the first few questions before they begin reading the text. There are often some that they can answer without reading, specifically those relating to domain 2a, “meaning of words in context”.
The “impression and evidence” questions often come up, and can be worth three marks. These questions can fluster children, but if you teach them to answer as simply as possible, their response can be much quicker.
Start with the impression: it’s often an adjective, and answers can be straightforward and snappy. For example, “Piper’s house is warm,” (2019 paper), “the granny is kind” (2018 paper), “the water is shiny” (2016 paper).
When it comes to evidence, get the children in the habit of underlining or highlighting how they know this, which they can then quote as their evidence. It is worth repeating this structure within guided reading lessons too to get them used to quoting evidence in their answers.
Those three-mark questions can make a huge difference if pupils feel confident in answering them. In many classrooms, PEE (point, evidence, explain) is used, but personally I have found that children struggle to discern between the “point” and the “explain”.
Instead, I teach them to “make a point and prove it”. This gives them a greater chance of getting the three marks for two acceptable points with one piece of evidence. They also like shouting “prove it” to each other during reading lessons.
The yes/no/maybe questions are worth three marks, and to speed things up here, I teach children to always circle “maybe”. It’s easier for them to think of one reason for “no” (with a “prove it” for evidence) and one reason for “yes” (again, with a “prove it” for evidence), rather than trying to write two points, one with a “prove it”. (Although, for extra security to achieve the three marks, there’s no harm in evidencing both.)
Inevitably, some children will run out of time, no matter how much you prepare them. It’s important to encourage them to leave five minutes to scan the questions for the multiple-choice, tick-box, “draw a line” or “order the events” type of questions, even if they haven’t finished others. These can be completed really quickly, and any answer is better than no answer at all.
