Reading

We strive to develop children that read for pleasure and foster a real love for reading. We monitor children’s reading very closely and keep track of the books that they are reading. Reading can be very complex as there are many skills that children need to develop in order to be able to read effectively. The first of which involves decoding the text. Some of our pupils attend daily phonics sessions so that they can blend and segment letters and sounds to help them with this. This is monitored closely by class teachers so that if children fall behind where they should be they will then attend "keep-up" sessions. Senior Leaders in school, monitor this on a half termly basis and might identify certain pupils to then attend further "catch-up" sessions to support the child. All phonic sessions also have Guided Reading sessions each week that enable our pupils to apply the sounds they have learnt to a phonetically decodable book. In addition to phonics, we also have a specialist reading teacher in school who works with a small number of pupils to ensure they are making progress at their level. 

As a school, children have daily Guided Reading sessions. These are taught differently across the school so that they are tailored to children's specific needs within their year group.

Once pupils have finished the phonics programme and have learnt all five phases of the GPCS (Grapheme, Phoneme, Correspondence) they will begin to develop their comprehension skills in Guided Reading sessions. These sessions have carefully planned high-quality texts that complement children's project learning. Teacher's carefully plan reading skills for the children to develop on a weekly basis. This evidence is collected in a floor book to demonstrate the progress pupils are making. 

In years 5 and 6, children also have carefully selected high-quality texts to complement their project learning. Their Guided Reading sessions are then broken down into a system that we call VIPERS - Vocabulary, Inference, Predicting, Explain, Retrieval and Sequencing/Summarising. This equips pupils with the skills to be able answer reading questions accurately and confidently. 

Our research tells us that children develop a true love of reading when they read at home as well as in school so we encourage children to read at home with an adult as often as possible and fill in their reading diary. Once children have completed a book they will carry out a quiz which allows them to practice their reading skills taught to them during Guided Reading. We also have lots of incentives in school to encourage children to read and to make reading fun. At 1.30pm every day, all children and adults- including our office staff- sit down and read for 15 minutes after lunch. We call this DEAR – Drop Everything and Read. We believe this teaches children the value of reading for pleasure and it also models to the children the importance of everybody enjoying reading.

During the academic year 2022/2023 we have some very exciting plans to install a brand-new library. This will enable able pupils to have access to a newer updated range of book stock and we have carefully selected books of all genres and themes so that they are receiving a diverse diet of quality texts. Alongside this, teachers have also implemented book displays in classrooms which display books to interest pupils and promote thoughts that engage them with their project work.