Reading
Intent
Our intent for Reading education is that children read fluently, both for enjoyment and information, enabling them to access the wider curriculum and world around them, to develop essential life skills and to nurture a love of reading, by developing:
- Enjoyment
- Reading Accuracy
- Comprehension
We value reading and place a great emphasis on teaching children to read well. We also do all we can to encourage children to read widely and often, creating a culture of reading at the school.
Implementation
At Wetheringsett, we use phonics as the main approach to the teaching of reading when children begin to read. This means that they are taught individual sounds and the skills of ‘blending’ these together to read whole words.
Phonics
We teach phonics through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds, but has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme which meets all the expectations of the National Curriculum.
Phonics lessons
- We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
- Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
- We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress. Please see the progression document below for reference.
For beginning readers, the books they read are predominantly books that are designed to be ‘phonically decodable’. This means that they are books that children can read by ‘sounding out’ the sounds they have learnt in their phonics lessons or by recognising ‘tricky words’ they have learnt.
As children become more fluent readers, they are encouraged to develop a wider range of strategies to read and this is reflected in the books they read.
In Early Years, the focus in class is on sharing books together and supporting children individually to begin to apply their phonics knowledge to read themselves. Reception children are provided with a story book with a range of activities to do with their grown up at home. We encourage these activities to be uploaded onto their Tapestry account so we can continue to foster the love of reading in school. The children take home a decodable book when they are able to decode words. In Key Stage 1, children have well planned, focused weekly guided reading sessions in a small group with a member of the teaching staff. In Key Stage 2, we have recently moved over to whole class reading lessons where the same text is studied and differentiated questions and activities based on the text are provided to ensure the appropriate level of challenge of all children.
And Online.......
Make reading fun with the following website which encourages reading through games.
Children may also read individually with a member of staff. We also really value volunteers who come into school to hear children read. Some children may be targeted for extra support in reading and we use intervention programmes to help those might be struggling to read.
Children are strongly encouraged to read at home at least 3 times a week and the younger children have word packs to take home to practice the phonics they are learning in class.
Throughout the school, we make time before collective worship each day for children to be read to by their teacher, or sometimes another child. We prioritise this as an important part of instilling a buzz around reading, to expose children to quality texts that are harder than ones they might read independently and for whole class discussion about texts.
We recently revamped our library and renamed it The Escape, as voted for by the children. They chose the name because reading lets you escape to other worlds, both real and imaginary. The Escape is open for children to use at lunchtimes and children get rewarded with a 'Golden Ticket' for excellent class work, which entitles them to have 10 minutes in The Escape by themselves during lesson time.