Power Hour is a literacy based hour which is currently being used to teach literacy in our 2nd classes in St. Declan’s NS. It is an intensive intervention of reading (one hour every day Monday to Thursday) which gives the pupils lots of opportunities to read books at their own level of competency. Small group literacy intervention has been shown to be particularly effective for children at this young age and all children participating in Power Hour are individually assessed before the programme starts in order to ascertain their instructional reading level. Power Hour is facilitated by the class teacher and our Special Education Team.

In Power Hour, we use five stations:

• Familiar book (working on pace, fluency, expression and comprehension).
• New book (working on pace, word attack skills, problem solving with text).
• Phonics, sight words and spellings.
• Grammar
• Independent station.

The children use our library of PM+ Books while this ‘Station Teaching’ is taking place. Ms Kelly’s 2nd class are currently doing Power Hour.