Giglets Education

How Fenwick Primary Added Value to the Reading Experience
When expectations are growing but budgets are falling, you have to be confident that how you spend that budget has a strong impact in the classroom, and is therefore really great value for money.

Giglets Education supports teachers in revolutionising their literacy teaching through a multi-award-winning online literacy resource at budget-friendly prices. Giglets transforms ‘teaching reading’ into an entire experience, which engages pupils across the board and can support individual, group, and whole class reading both in the classroom and at home.

Keira Finlayson joined Fenwick Primary School in East Ayrshire in Scotland as Headteacher in 2017, and was keen to develop innovative teaching methods within her staff, as well as to build strong partnership links with families.

“Giglets added another dimension to our literacy programme. It’s a high-quality, engaging resource with huge capacity for differentiation. Being able to use it, in class and at home, with all learners, while targeting individual pupils and groups is very beneficial.

“Since introducing Giglets, we have seen great engagement from pupils, parents and teachers. Pupils find the digital element really motivational and parents enjoy using it with their children at home.”

To make reading an immersive experience, Giglets books are enhanced by animations, theme music, audio and illustrations and pupils are able to totally personalise their reading experience through choosing their font, font size, font colour and page colour using the accessible book reader.

Keira also knows all too well that physical books can so quickly go missing or become ruined and recognises the strain this puts on the school budget.

“It’s having access to such a wide variety of books across all the ages and stages, as well as texts of a lower reading level but higher interest level, that makes Giglets excellent value for money. We would be unable to buy as many physical copies to share among our pupils. With Giglets, every pupil has their own copy to read and annotate.”

Supporting each book within Giglets there are question sets and curriculum-specific tasks that centre around developing confidence in using various reading strategies to understand a text.

“There are so many tasks for teachers to use both in class and at home which frees up planning and preparation time for teachers. Teachers enjoy having a huge bank of resources and can use Giglets both for curriculum-focused work as well as reading for enjoyment with their classes.”

Fenwick Primary School is an excellent example of how Giglets can and should be used to add value to the reading (and learning) experience.

Was there ever a time where teachers worked 35-hour weeks? I doubt it. Whether you’re working 40, 50 or 60 hours a week, we all know, it needs to be reduced, as teachers deserve a positive work-life balance.

A resource that helps me reduce planning and marking time when in the classroom is Giglets: an online literacy resource, bursting with texts and tasks for primary and early secondary education. Giglets supports learners and teachers in developing reading comprehension by creating an immersive experience for the learner and providing the teacher with a broad range of high-quality tasks, linked to the curriculum.

With a few clicks, you can assign your learners an engaging text complete with animations, theme music, audio and illustrations. Thank goodness there is no need to sort through the piles of (sometimes tatty) books in the library, hoping there are enough copies. This can then be used for individual, group or whole-class reading with huge capacity for differentiation.

With a couple more clicks you can pick and choose the tasks suitable for your focus. There are reading test questions, higher order thinking skills questions and a wide variety cross-curricular tasks available.

On finishing a task, children can complete a self-assessment, giving teachers immediate feedback on how confident a learner felt with a task. I felt that was invaluable for planning next steps in learning and ensuring I was meeting the needs of each individual learner.

Just as invaluable is the way of marking within Giglets. Reading test questions, where pupils can demonstrate their understanding of a text, are marked automatically by the system, giving the learner immediate feedback on success and areas of text which should be reviewed. This can then be submitted to the teacher and either printed or stored within the archive. Higher order thinking skills questions and cross-curricular tasks can be marked on- or offline in the way that suits the teacher best. I often used peer-assessment and class review, as well as individual marking, to keep my marking load manageable.

This also works well for homework, as it can be assigned, marked and fed-back via the platform, eliminating the time spent at the photocopier or typing up homework tasks.

In order to support learners and ensure learning is accessible for all, I have a teacher friend who prints her resources on four different colours of paper. This is, of course, admirable and all part of being an effective teacher, but we can’t deny that this takes her extra time. Through Giglets, learners can personalise their reading experience by choosing their page colour, font colour, font and font size in the accessible reader. The full platform is compatible with screen readers which ensures that all learners can access the curriculum through Giglets.

Teachers have a wide range of tools available to them which can enhance learning and help reduce workload. Giglets is one I would certainly recommend adding to your toolkit.