The Teaching of Reading

Our Vision for

Reading.

Our Reading curriculum aims to equip all children with the skills & knowledge to enable them to lead a happy, healthy & purposeful life.

We believe every child has the right to leave school being able to read fluently and well. We are also committed to enabling our children to actively enjoy reading for pleasure. Reading is the passport to so many opportunities and opens so many doors in the world. Our reading spine introduces children to books that they can study and be involved with. We have class novels and expect children to be read to every day. We have small library areas, for each key stage, that children visit. Throughout the year we have a range of events for parents: Reading Café, “Helping your child with reading” workshops and lots of website support. We believe that the best way to produce confident, fluent and enthusiastic readers is through partnership with our parents and carers.

Content and Sequencing

Books are a focus of all we do - children are read to by an adult every day. We see reading as three key skills: decoding, fluency and comprehension.

We begin the teaching of reading (decoding, prosody and comprehension) through a synthetic phonics programme “Little Wandle”. Children in FS and KS1 have a 15/20 mins reading session three times a week in small groups. The children learn letters (graphemes) and corresponding sounds (phonemes) they blend and segment these sounds to read words and spell them.  This begins in Nursery with Phase 1, Phase 2&3 secured in FS where we also begin phase 4. Phase 4 and 5 is secured in Year 1 and Year2.

Children bring two types of books home. “Books I can read to you” (all children have these phonically decodable books until they have mastered their phonics) and “Books you can read to me” (a colour coded book an adult can share because the children cannot decode it fully). Once children are confident with their phonics, they have access to a range of colour coded books that become increasingly challenging. All classes have their own reading corner and each unit have a small library area, where children are able to choose their books to read and take home. Children are taught how to read and answer a range of questions, we get support from using content domains and Hooked On Books Reading Rainbow lenses. Teaching new vocabulary is a vital part of the comprehension sessions, as is discussing the text depth during Book Talk sessions (see below reading session). All children have access to Guided Reading in year 2 to 6, this takes the form of whole class reading.

Links across the curriculum

Reading is the passport to all other subjects in school.

Reading therefore is reinforced and practiced across all subjects. Sometimes, the texts chosen (if it appropriate) are linked to the wider curriculum to support with vocabulary acquisition.

Knowledge organisers introduce new vocabulary.

Tier 1 vocab basic high frequency used in spoken language

Tier 2 High frequency multiple meaning, written text

Tier 3 subject specific.

The wider curriculum is therefore essential to support and develop tier three vocabulary.

Reading session

Vocabulary

Key Skill/ Reading Lenses

Read text

Book Talk

Model of strategy (Demonstration Comprehension)

Book Talk

Independent Comprehension

 Sentence stems and APE.

Teacher works with various groups throughout the week and offer additional support where necessary.

Teaching fluency is key through all lessons.

Progress/assessment

We follow our developed Road to Reading to assess and monitor progress.

In FS and KS1, children undergo regular phonic assessments. We also use the benchmarking scheme to identify children’s book bands. NFER and SATs tests are used to assess all children.

2023 DATA

EYFS – Exp   Exc

Y1 Phonics 2023- 73% 

KS1 Reading 2023 – EXS  63%   GDS  5%

KS2 Reading 2023– EXS 78%    GDS 35%

Support

All children are expected to learn to read.

We have a range of evidenced based intervention when gaps begin to appear.

Little Wandle Catch up Programme, Little Wandle Rapid- Catch-Up Programme, Serial Mash and Project X Code.

Whole school targets

To increase the number of children reaching GDS at the end of KS1 and KS2.