Once you have identified any gaps in the children’s attainment you can plan individual, group and class activities to support and advance their knowledge and understanding so that they will be able to meet the planned objectives and outcomes for their age group by the end of the school term or year.

Teacher Assessment
You should allocate some time at the start of a new literacy or numeracy topic to try and discover the children’s current skills and understanding so that you plan future lessons to plug any gaps. Begin a numeracy topic by displaying some example number calculations that contain errors for the children to identify and correct. Ask the class to explain how to perform different calculations so that you can ascertain their current knowledge. You can launch a literacy topic by working with the class to read and discuss a specific type of text. Ask the children to describe how the text has been structured and formatted including the use of special vocabulary and punctuation. This will help you plan future lessons to develop the children’s reading responses and writing skills as they progress through the school year.

Formal Assessment
At the start of the term, you can get the children to complete some more formal assessments to build up a picture of their current attainment and select areas for improvement. Working in numeracy, select some questions for the children to complete from the previous year group’s National Curriculum objectives such as written addition of four digit numbers or calculating fractions of a quantity. Get the class to work individually before sharing their responses with the whole class. Working in literacy, you can ask the children to complete an independent piece of fiction or non-fiction writing which you can then use to assess their writing transcription and composition skills. You can then target individual children or groups in the class who might need extra support in developing skills and abilities across a range of objectives.

Year Group Objectives
Spend some time identifying key skills and objectives from the previous year that the children should already be confident in using when completing a range of classroom work. Create some checklists that you can use to monitor if individual or groups of children in the class are working towards or have completed or exceeded a particular objective. You can then select and build classroom activities using the checklists for individual or groups of children in the class. For example, if the children should be able to use a range of conjunctions to link and co-ordinate sentence clauses from the previous year group objectives then you can plan additional activities to get individual or groups in the class to practise using additional conjunctions in their own writing.

Numeracy Interventions
Some children in the class might need some extra individual attention to further support their understanding of key numeracy skills and objectives. You can select activities for the children to complete based on the current work. For example, if some children are having problems multiplying and dividing numbers then you can plan some additional activities to develop their recall of the times tables which will then support their number calculation work in the future.

Reading Interventions
You can split the class into small reading groups to target specific skills and knowledge. Select texts to match the reading abilities of the children in each group. Allow individual children in the group to practise reading aloud parts of the text so that they can develop reading techniques and abilities. You can then spend time discussing how the read text has been structured and formatted to assess the children’s understanding of text genres and styles. Set some children a writing task to match the read text to further assess their skills in working with different forms of texts.