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Early Reading
In Early Years Foundation Stage, we promote early reading in children as soon as they arrive with us in September as we believe this underpins their natural curiosity of storytelling and enjoyment of stories. Following Read Write Inc. a systematic, synthetic phonics programme, we begin to teach individual phonemes during daily phonic sessions, as well as how to segment and blend sounds in words to read them.
Our consistent approach to the teaching of our systematic phonics curriculum enables children to become confident, fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers, which in turn, unlocks doors to the rest of the curriculum allowing children to flourish in all areas.
Children are given a reading book which carefully matches their phonic understanding for them to enjoy at home, thus allowing them to experience early reading success, gain confidence and consolidate the learning that takes place in school.
In Foundation Stage 2, Year 1 and 2, we follow the Read Write Inc scheme which provides a structured and systematic approach to teaching phonics, designed to create fluent readers and confident speakers. The programme includes a variety of fiction and non-fiction books to develop the children's reading age.
Reading for Purpose
We place reading at the centre of our curriculum and recognise that being able to read well is a key life skill for children. We believe that every child can learn to read with the right teaching, support and encouragement.
Just like any other area of the curriculum, we build time for all children to read independently, read aloud and be read to during the school day.
From the Spring term, in Year 2, the children move onto Whole Class Reading. This ensures they are exposed to a wider variety of texts such as poetry and children’s classic novels while focusing more on KS1 National Curriculum objectives such as the author's choice of language, retrieval, inference and prediction.
From Year 3, we use a Whole Class Reading scheme which ensures the children are exposed to a wide range of texts pitched at age-related expectations. For two days the children will study the class novel and focus on key skills such as the author’s choice of language, prediction and summary.
In order to guarantee that the children are reading for breadth and balance, for the other three days, they will study texts which are linked through a theme; these texts could be anything ranging from ‘Inspirational Women’ to ‘Songs from Musicals’. Within these lessons, we teach and model how to answer questions covering a whole range of skills in line with the Key Sage 2 National Curriculum.
Read Write Inc: Fresh Start is used as an intervention to support those working below agerelated expectations.
Reading for Pleasure
Reading for pleasure has so many benefits: it can increase empathy, improve relationships with others and improve wellbeing throughout life. It can also make people feel more connected to the wider community as it increases a person’s understanding of their own identity and gives them an insight into the world view of others.
Children who read for pleasure make significantly more progress in vocabulary, spelling and maths than those who read very little. Children with more positive attitudes towards reading are more likely to read at or above the expected level for their age. Developing positive attitudes towards reading plays a key role in children’s development, and we encourage children to read books of their choice for pleasure to encourage a positive attitude and a lifelong interest in reading.
Each child will take a short test which will determine their reading age. This will then ascertain which colour book they can take home. In each colour, there are many books which your child can choose – they can select something which intrigues or interests them, thus fostering a love of reading.
Our recently refurbished and restocked library hosts a wealth of genres from traditional fairy tales to modern graphic novels and twisted tales. The children choose a book that interests them to take home, based on their assessed reading age, to read at their leisure. This can then be changed as frequently as needed. Reading records helpfully track themes children may become interested in.
Throughout the year, we host whole school reading experiences to strengthen children’s reading enjoyment, such as themed reading days, competitions and regular cross-phase reading buddy schemes to help more reluctant readers.
Reading Across Curriculum
We believe that learning is built upon a love of reading. As such, we pledge to read to the children for 10 minutes every day (separate to our reading lessons). This is to ensure that children can enjoy a story read with expression and intonation.
Every one of our themes, which are changed half-termly, have a great book at its core. Our thematic learning often links to the stories we are reading and this allows the children to access the lessons with greater understanding and enthusiasm.
Reading is often at the forefront of our afternoon lessons, whether it’s reading newspapers from the Second World War to discover how it began in Year 6 to reading about Queen Elizabeth II and her coronation in Year 2. Our reading penguin symbol is displayed during theme lessons so that children know that they are reading across the curriculum.