Reading
“I declare there is no enjoyment like reading” Jane Austen
Intent
At Puss Bank School and Nursery, our aim is for children to become lifelong readers. We ensure that children are consistently exposed to a rich diet of literature so that they can experience a broad range of texts and further develop their breadth and depth of vocabulary. Our phonics curriculum is designed to be progressive and cohesive, ensuring that children continuously build upon their prior knowledge and ‘bridge back’ to what they already know to help them to know more and remember more. Our aim is to develop the children’s fluency and accuracy in decoding so that it becomes automatic and does not require conscious effort. Reading for Pleasure sessions provide socially engaging reading environments where children are encouraged to share their love of books.
Implementation
Nursey, Reception and Year 1
We start teaching Little Wandle Foundations in our Nursey and then, from Reception, we follow the Little Wandle progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell fluently as they move through school.
(See Phonics Section for more information)
Nursery:
During their time in Early Years, the children are immersed in a range of high-quality texts which act as a strong foundation for their reading journeys through school and in the wider world.
The Nursery is a language rich environment which aims to foster a love of reading by sharing stories, songs and rhymes on a daily basis. In addition, games and activities are employed to help build communication and language skills. During small group reading session’s children develop their concepts about print, holding the book the correct way, turning pages and pointing to text and pictures.
Reception and Year 1
High quality texts from our reading curriculum form the backbone of our curriculum enabling our children to make cross curricula links between all areas of learning.
Core texts are share and enjoyed during classroom times. Children are then encouraged to explore activities related to these high-quality reading texts within our continuous provision where they are able to continue their own learning journey. Our provisions inside and outside provide a language and print rich environment where children can read labels, instructions and other reading books independently.
Story time is a favourite part of everyone's day which encourages their love of reading, develops vocabulary and wider literacy skills.
Year 2 to Year 6
A typical reading week starts with a ‘Love me First’ session to motivate and engage the children with the chosen high quality text. In addition, this lesson activates prior knowledge and always involves a model read aloud. The second session focuses on children’s fluency. A variety of read aloud strategies are employed to develop and embed children’s expression, automaticity and word recognition, rhythm and phrasing and smoothness (E.A.R.S). Our ‘In the Moment of Reading’ and ‘Building Meaning’ lessons then develop the key skills of comprehension: prediction, questioning, clarifying, summarising and inference. These strategies are explicitly modelled to the children through teacher ‘think aloud’. Our aim is for the children to gradually take the responsibility for automatically using these strategies to monitor and improve their own understanding of the text. Diagnostic assessment is used to elicit gaps in children’s reading which are then targeted through interventions such as Rapid Catch Up Phonics, BR@P and Fluency Sessions.
Reading for Pleasure
We have embedded the ‘Reading for Pleasure’ ethos at Puss Bank School and Nursery to create a love of reading for all. Teachers provide socially engaging reading environments where children are encouraged to share their love of books. We have dedicated sessions where children and teachers read for pleasure. These sessions include teacher and peer reading aloud, informal book talk and reading recommendations. Teachers are seen as Reading Teachers and display the book that they are currently reading so that children can come and ask them about it.
Impact
Our aims for all children at Puss Bank Primary School and Nursey are to:
· Facilitate the teaching of systematic and synthetic phonics in an organised sequence and providing visual context for learnt phonemes and spelling patterns in modelled reading.
· Support children to become lifelong readers through motivation and engagement.
· Provide a wide range of texts, both fiction, non-fiction and poetry, in order to give a breadth of styles and voices.
· Support children independently activating their prior learning when exploring a new text.
· Cultivate fluent readers who use correct intonation and pace when reading aloud.
· Provide a range of reading experiences to promote Reading for Pleasure.
· Model and teach the key comprehension strategies of prediction, questioning, clarifying, summarising, inference and activating prior knowledge.
· Proactively encourage pupils at home to continue their practice with support from their parents.