The teachers noticed difficulties with reading and comprehension already in the first triad in the literacy process, when students have varying levels of motivation and different pre-reading experiences. Challenges with word comprehension, readiness to listen to spoken texts, and discussion about the reading material were already evident with many students. Even greater difficulties emerged in the second triad, when students were expected to have developed reading skills to the point of being able to fluently read slightly longer texts with understanding, engage in discussions about the material, or write a brief summary. Reading difficulties that surfaced in the second triad typically worsen and increase in the third triad, as the length and complexity of texts in various subjects also increase. Due to all of the above, we have set the following goals of the project: - Improving reading technique and reading comprehension in the 4th and 5th grades, especially for students with problems developing reading skills, - improving reading skills in the 6th and 7th grades, - developing functional literacy as a tool for independent acquisition of knowledge in the 8th and 9th grades.
This was our first Erasmus+ project. Anton Aškerc Velenje Primary School, founded in 1971, is the second largest primary school in Velenje. The main school has 520 pupils and we also have a subsidiary school with 53 pupils. The school has a wide variety of pupils aged 6 to 15, who mostly live near the school, often in blocks of flats. Many pupils come from single-parent families, we have quite a lot of students with special needs and immigrants from Bosnian- and Albanian-speaking areas. After a needs analysis done at our school, the biggest challenge has proven to be functional literacy, including the ability to read, understand, evaluate and summarize the written information. All this is necessary for the development of other literacies (mathematical, scientific, media). That is why we decided functional literacy to be our main focus of our first Erasmus+ project. Before the start of the project, the school carried out activities to promote reading, improve reading techniques and reading comprehension (e.g. additional hours of Slovenian for immigrants, formative monitoring of reading progress, NTC learning system, project OBJEM, Reading together and others).