Marie Clay Literacy Resources
Marie Clay was an influential literacy researcher and educationalist who pioneered the Reading Recovery programme. Her research and books have changed the experience of learning to read for children in Australia and around the world.
Essential Resources is the only distributor of Marie Clay books and sheet pads in Australia. Her most popular titles include Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals – a valuable resource for those teachers who wish to design individualised Reading Recovery literacy lessons.
Running Records for Classroom Teachers is a tool for teachers to assess how learners read independently – for example, what is a child looking at when they read? Similarly, Record of Oral Language helps teachers to observe and understand the changes in oral language development.
What is the Reading Recovery literacy programme?
Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery literacy programme is a proven early literacy intervention. It is for children with the lowest achievements in reading and writing at the end of their first year of primary school.
The programme involves individual, daily instruction from a specially-trained Reading Recovery teacher for 12 to 20+ weeks. First, the teacher does an assessment to identify the child’s literacy strengths and needs. They then design a series of literacy lessons adapted to the child’s capabilities. In each 30-minute lesson, the child receives explicit instruction in re-reading, reading, writing and word work activities.
The Reading Recovery programme aims to bring struggling literacy learners to the average bands of literacy performance in a relatively short time. The emphasis is on developing confident readers and writers who are independent problem-solvers.
How do Marie Clay’s books help students struggling with reading and writing?
Marie Clay’s book help students struggling with reading and writing in several ways:
Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals helps children develop strategies for picking up information in print. The book outlines Reading Recovery lessons that teach students to self-monitor their reading, correct errors and problem-solve while reading.
By problem-solving, it is meant how, in the early stages of literacy development, children use several sources of information to make sense of the words on the page. From visual cues, the sounds the letters make, the way the words are put together and whether it makes sense to the child based on their knowledge.
When teachers implement Clay’s Reading Recovery lessons, their students also learn how to compose and write stories of increasing complexity.
Running Records for Classroom Teachers is another Marie Clay book. It is a means of documenting children’s reading progress. As teachers know, assessment should inform teaching. Running Records are no different. They allow teachers to match texts to students and cater learning for individual differences.
What Marie Clay Reading Recovery resources are the most popular with teachers?
The most popular Marie Clay reading recovery resources are:
Running Records for Classroom Teachers
What do you notice children doing as they read? What are they looking at? This teaching resource introduces Running Records, and then shows teachers how to closely observe and record what students do and say as they read.
The observations recorded provide accurate and reliable information to assess young children’s progress in learning to read.
Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals
Marie Clay’s book expands on the teaching practices and theoretical understandings that underpin the early literacy intervention, Reading Recovery.
The literacy lessons build on children’s strengths as the foundation for further learning and maximise children’s contributions to their lessons. As Marie Clay said: “How can a switch to individual instruction be so powerful in its effects? … The lessons start with what the child can already do.”
The resource is not only valuable to Reading Recovery teachers. It is also valuable for those teachers who wish to design individual literacy lessons to meet their students’ needs.
Daily lesson records sheets are to accompany Reading Recovery programmes. They are for primary school teachers to note students’ progress as they engage with familiar and new texts and writing activities.
An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement
Clay’s early literacy resource provides primary teachers and schools with information about how to assess children’s early reading and writing knowledge.
The latest edition also includes observation tasks for assessing phonemic awareness and sound-letter knowledge.