The document below summarises our reading provision. There is further information below about some of the aspects.
It is extremely important that children read aloud to an adult regularly to support them learning to read. We encourage parents to listen to their children read at home and we also give high priority to children reading aloud to an adult in school.
How often children read to an adult in school depends on the stage of reading they are at:
We ensure that individual reading is given priority and always takes place regardless of other events happening in school. When a member of staff is absent, support staff will be redeployed from other classes to ensure that individual reading still happens.
When adults listen to children read they will make a short note in the child’s planner and will write a more detailed comment in the child’s reading record which is kept in school. Comments will be based on children’s decoding, fluency and/or comprehension skills. We have recently developed our documents for recording children's reading to ensure that sessions focus on supporting children with what they need to help them make progress. The links below take you to the reading record template and also to the guidance document that staff use when completing them.
We have invested a great deal in our early reading books to ensure that they are all decodable and match the progression of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised which is our phonics programme.
Our main scheme is Collins Big Cat for Little Wandle. Children read these books as part of their group reading lessons and can then access the same text as an e-reader at home. We also have books from other schemes that are mapped across the phases and children take home a book matched to their phonics level.
Children are assessed in phonics every 6 weeks so that we know we are always matching books appropriately.
In Key Stage 2 we use Accelerated Reader to ensure reading books are appropriately matched to the children's reading. Children take a short test which determines which levels of Accelerated Reader books that they read.
After every book that they've read the children complete a quiz on the computer about the book that they've read before moving onto their next book. This checks their understanding, provides assessment data for the teacher and also earns them points that they can collect as rewards.
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write by developing their phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate different sounds used in the English language. Children learn the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.
We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised to teach phonics. All children in Reception and Year 1 have a daily 45 minutes phonics lesson.
During the Summer term in Year 1, children nationwide are tested on their phonic knowledge. This test helps us to identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge and may need further support in Year 2. Children read a list of 40 words, some real words and some nonsense words, and the test takes place with their class teacher who aims to make it low key and not something for the children to worry about.
We follow the Destination Reader approach for teaching reading. In Key Stage 2 every class has a daily 45 minute reading lesson at the start of each day. Each week there is a focused reading strategy and over the course of the week there is an introduction to the strategy, modelled examples, opportunities to practise the strategy and guided reading. The lessons are focused around a text which can be seen in our Core Text Overview below and we have individual copies of books for each child to use during the lessons. The document below gives an overview of how Destination Reader works.
Every class has a 15 minute class story at the end of each day.