Why Reading Is Important
At Stoke Minster (CE) Primary Academy we believe that reading is an essential life skill which is not only integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them, but is a skill which provides access to a wealth of opportunities and opens the door to a rich and balanced curriculum. It is vital that our children acquire good reading skills in order to access the information that will support their progress in all areas.
We recognise that proficient reading allows children to gain an understanding that is beyond what they already know as it enables them to share in cultural and historical experiences and to develop the vocabulary that they need to express themselves effectively. Our reading curriculum strives to foster a life-long love of reading. We promote the behaviours that children will need to become perceptive and confident readers both in the frequency and variety of what the children read, alongside discussions about what has been read and through building independence ensuring that our children become articulate and literate individuals who have a positive attitude towards reading.
Early Reading
At Stoke Minster, we teach early reading through the systematic, synthetic phonics programme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This is a fully comprehensive programme, which builds progressively throughout Reception and Year One, preparing children for the statutory phonics screening that takes place at the end of Year One.
Phonics is taught every day and children learn to apply their phonics skills in reading practise sessions 3 times a week, which focuses on developing their decoding, prosody and comprehension skills along the way.
Right from the start of Reception children take part in a daily phonics lesson which follows the progression for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds and this continues in Year One to ensure children become fluent readers. Phonics is taught for 25 minutes a day. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress. Four new phonemes and their corresponding graphemes are taught (GPCs) each week and they are then used in the final lesson of the week to review the week’s learning. Children will also learn tricky words during these sessions.
In the Autumn and Spring term, Reception learn phase 2 and phase 3 GPCs and then will spend the final term learning phase 4.
Year 1 begin the Autumn term with the revision of phases 2, 3 and 4 before learning phase 5, which will be completed by the end of the year. Year 2 children will begin the year by revisiting phase 5 and other previously taught phases to ensure all children are completely confident with applying these GPCs in both their reading and also their writing.
Daily assessment of learning also takes place within the classroom so staff can quickly identify any children who are at risk of falling behind ensuring that appropriate and timely intervention is implemented. This is in addition to the half termly assessments which take place throughout Reception and Year 1 to inform future teaching and to help identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge; these children take part in our Little Wandle ‘Keep up’ sessions which are held in addition to the daily phonics lesson.
Children in Reception and Year 1, read fully decodable books with an adult at least 3 times per week during our ‘Reading Practice’ sessions. These books are sent home for children to build their reading fluency and for them demonstrate their developing skills and phonetic knowledge to their parents/carers.
Reading in Key Stage Two
In Key Stage Two reading in taught during whole class sessions where no child is left behind. Whole class reading sessions are taught for 30 minutes every day. A typical week has two sessions based on the class’s daily novel and three sessions based on the wider curriculum.
The class novel is read to the children for 15 minutes a day directly after lunch or at the end of the school day. During this time the children are read to by the teacher as this is an opportunity for the teacher to model how to read aloud fluently with expression and intonation. The main purpose of this session is to enjoy the book therefore discussion about characters and plot is kept to a minimum during this time. The class novel is then studied in whole class reading sessions on Monday and Thursday for 30 minutes per session. The aims of these sessions is to explore the themes of the text and to develop the children’s discussion and interpretation skills alongside deepening the children’s understanding of the text. At Stoke Minster, our aim is that the children will develop a love of reading and an enthusiasm for discussing a variety of texts. During these 2 whole class novel sessions fluency is encouraged through choral, individual and modelled reading and a rich discussion of the over-arching themes of the text also takes place. These sessions end with a balanced argument question where the children are encouraged to share their own opinions and thoughts using evidence or information from the text. We limit the amount of exam-style questions during these sessions focusing instead on fluency and high-quality discussion.
On the remaining three days, the whole class reading sessions link to the wider curriculum; such as science, RE, history or geography. On occasions, the session will link to what the children are writing about in English, for example widening their knowledge about mountain exploration or the Great Fire of London. The aim of these sessions is to cover pivotal knowledge that the children need to access the wider curriculum. For example, if Year 3 are preparing to do history lesson about Roman invasion, the morning reading lesson may cover the knowledge needed around this leaving time in the history lesson for our children to have more opportunities to develop skills required to be a historian e.g. an analysing sources. By covering a range of topics during the reading lessons, staff have longer to impart the required knowledge and more time to discuss it, but there is also more time for our children to develop disciplinary skills throughout the curriculum and in many instances, the children have more fun doing it. We find that the children also approach our wider curriculum lessons with more confidence as they already have a lot of the knowledge and vocabulary required to join in with meaningful discussions in our wider curriculum lessons.
On some occasions, these reading sessions can also be used to develop our children on a spiritual, moral and cultural level as children will also read about relevant current events (for example, the women’s World Cup, Remembrance Day, General elections etc.) It also gives opportunity to explore poetry and other types of literature which again develops the children’s ability to read for pleasure as well as for a purpose.
Reading for Pleasure
The children are read to every day; the teachers read aloud the class book for at least 15 minutes. These class texts are chosen carefully so there is a range of high quality, diverse texts to engage and appeal to a wide range of children. Many of our texts support the learning within the wider curriculum, they may be read prior to some units e.g. The Boy at the Back of the Class is read prior to the topic of migration to build empathy and develop understanding of the plight of refugees; other texts are studied alongside to deepen understanding and to build engagement e.g. Friend or Foe in Year 6 or Katie in London in Year1. Staff are also free to read novels which they think will pique the interest of the cohort, although these are not taught as part of our English writing sequence.
As part of our No Outsiders program each class studies a picture book each half term which is carefully selected to develop a curriculum response to the Equality Act 2010. Our No Outsiders book selection encourages children to explore identities, focus on diversity and embrace difference; each half term the children read a picture book together and discuss the themes introduced before sharing their opinion on the themes discussed.
Reading is encouraged at home and parents are supported to understand how to read to/with their children; reading at home is encouraged 3x per week. Careful recording of children’s reading takes place on Boom Reader both at home and in school so staff are able to quickly monitor the opportunities that children have to read; children who do not read at home are read with by an adult in school on a regular basis. All children who have passed the phonics screen are assessed using a star reader test and allocated a book on the Accelerated Reader scheme. Using this scheme, the children are allocated a ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) range and children can choose from a wide range of high interest books which are catalogued to suit their reading ability.
Every child in Y1-Y6 goes on a class visit to the local library in the first half-term; this session is led by a member of the Local Library team. During the visit, the children are given a tour of the library, they learn how the library is organised and how to borrow a book and they are read to at the library. The children leave the visit with an individual library card to enable them to borrow books with their families; during the visit they are able to choose a book which they can read for pleasure in school. Children are also encouraged to borrow books from the class library.
Celebrating The Love Of Reading
During our weekly celebration assembly, one child from each class is given a reading award: this can be given for reading regularly at home, recommending texts or modelling excellent reading within the classroom.
At Stoke Minster, we celebrate our love of reading during World Book Day where we all dressed up as our favourite book character and spent the day enjoying texts in our classroom – check out our World Book Day video!
We also hold book fayres and take part in sponsored read events – last academic year we worked together to raise over £1000 to buy books for our class libraries! Over the summer, some of us are completing the National Reading Aloud challenge – watch this space!
