Reading
Intent
As a school, we believe that creating a culture of reading is vital to ensure our children can access the full curriculum. We want to offer a passion for reading to extend far beyond our school, allowing them to build their skills independently through a real curiosity and thirst for knowledge and a sense of the importance of reading as a key tool for future learning. We are determined that every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs, or abilities.
From Early Years, we teach reading through the systematic and synthetic phonics programme, ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’. This ensures our children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. As a result, all our children can tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At our school we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Implementation
Reception & Key Stage 1
Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader, who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and they monitor and support our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme.
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1
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 and we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of rapid progress. Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by an adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
Daily phonics lessons are also timetabled for any child who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Rapid catch-up. If any child has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps and follow the SEND programme. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.
Children are taught to read through reading practice sessions three times a week by a fully trained member of staff to small groups of approximately six children, using books closely matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge, using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments, and book matching grids. These groups are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis. In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books. We continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books. Children have access to the reading area every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.
Home reading- The decodable, reading, practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family with a reading for pleasure books also sent home for parents to share and read to children. The Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources are used to engage our families and share information about phonics. Children have a home reading record. The parent/carer comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will write in this on a regular basis to ensure communication between home and school.
Key Stage 2
In Key Stage 2, explicit metacognitive strategies for reading (listening to the voice in your mind that speaks while you read) are taught through whole class guided reading. The purpose of teaching reading comprehension strategies is to enable children to read with deeper, longer lasting understanding. Our role is to help children become avid readers who look forward to time alone with a great book to read.
Reading lessons
These occur daily for a minimum of 30 minutes. It is vital that children are read to every day. Therefore, this time is scheduled so that it is protected. The chosen novel is challenging and is read aloud only by the class teacher so that children get the best understanding from it. It is then studied for 2 days of the whole class reading lesson. Throughout these lessons, the focus is upon the content domains of prediction, summarising and sequencing as these cannot be fully explored through an extract; children have concrete background knowledge of the text to use- short extracts don’t provide the breadth of context to do this. Lots of recapping and quizzes are incorporated to ensure all children are on the ‘same page’ in understanding the text.
The remaining 3 days cover a text or texts linked together with a theme. This could be linked to: an issue or theme in the class novel; the current foundation topic; a text/issue the teacher/children is/are passionate about; the time of year - Christmas, black history month, autism awareness week etc.; something the children have shown an interest in; something the teacher has discovered the children knew nothing about; or anything that enriches the lives, knowledge and cultural capital of our children. These should cover all genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, songs and picture books. The main skills covered are inference and retrieval. Again, retention is a key focus alongside specific teaching of unfamiliar vocabulary and strategies to overcome this as well as deeper questions and activities through individual thinking, partnered talk and solo work.
All children have the opportunity to read aloud to the teacher across these sessions to build fluency through strategies such as echo and choral reading with modelling from the class teacher.
Some children will still need 1:1 reading sessions and/or phonics intervention with a teacher or TA within a week, especially if they are struggling with decoding. Wherever possible, this should happen outside of the reading lesson. During the lesson, adults will work with them as a group to read to them and/or pre-read.
Reading for pleasure
We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our ‘Reading for Pleasure’ pedagogy. We read to children every day. These books are chosen carefully to ensure children experience a wide range of books, including texts that enable our children to see themselves reflected within them and that of our local community, as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures. This may include rhymes in Early Years and a class novel in Key Stage 2.
Every classroom has an inviting book area that encourages a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books, offering a wide breadth of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books within each class. Our ‘Reading Curriculum’ is often linked to our wider curriculum. Books drive learning and are always at the forefront of the curriculum.
Children’ home reading continue in KS2 through weekly homework and access to the class library. Each class has a special book box, which goes home with the ‘Writer of the Week’ each week. This contains a range of books, hot chocolate and a book to record activities completed.
Monitoring
We use a comprehensive monitoring system focusing on targets in different areas so it is possible to identify exactly where interventions or support is needed. This are updated regularly and discussed termly in Pupil progress meetings. We also work with the English Hub.
Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.
Assessment for learning is used: daily within class to identify children needing Keep-up support; weekly, to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings; use of target sheets to focus on and monitor the different reading domains.
Summative assessment is used each half term in EYFS to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need.
NFER standardised reading tests are used at the end of each term from Year 1 (Spring term) to review reading progress. Y2 and Y6 use past SATs papers.
Statutory assessment - Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics Screening Check. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Y2. Year 6 sit the end of KS2 SATS.
Impact
We firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments.
Children leave our school having grown in ability and confidence with their reading. We aim to create enthusiastic readers, who have experienced a wealth of authors and genres, opening up their experiences, imaginations and desires to read more.
The impact on our children is clear- they will have made excellent progress from their starting point and will have developed transferrable skills. Our end of Key Stage 2 reading results are usually very good. We hope that as children move on from Christ Church Denshaw, their creativity, passion and high aspiration for reading remains with them and continue to grow and develop as they do.
