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Christ Church CE Primary School
'Let your light shine' Matthew 5:16
Reading
Reading Statement of Intent
learn to read and take pleasure in reading to learn
At Christ Church, we use picture books, novels, poems and factual texts from EYFS to Year 6 to engage and stimulate learning. We ensure children are exposed to high quality literature that deepens and challenges their knowledge and understanding. We encourage children to be ‘active’ readers. This means we want children to be asking questions as they read, we want them to be puzzled by the challenging pitch of the selected texts and we want them to be making predictions and reflecting on what they have read. Although independent reading time is crucial for enjoyment, reading encompasses many other skills, which need discrete opportunities to explore. We have whole school guided reading sessions where the children focus on developing specific reading skills.
Reading is taught through shared reading sessions, guided reading sessions and opportunities to practise and consolidate skills through independent reading. During these sessions, staff use a wide range of strategies to try and enhance the teaching of reading.
Some of these are outlined below:
Modelling and discussing the features of written texts through shared reading of texts.
Giving direction to develop key strategies in reading.
Demonstration – e.g. how to use punctuation when reading, using a shared text.
Explanation to clarify and discuss e.g. need for grammatical agreement when proof reading.
Questioning – to probe pupil’s understanding of text. Investigation of ideas – to understand, expand on or generalise about themes and structures in fiction and non-fiction.
Discussion and argument – to justify preference.
Provision of a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres, for the children to choose from.
Reading Statement of Implementation
At Christ Church Primary School, we believe that there are two important phases in reading development:
learning to read
reading to learn
Learning to read:
Children learn to rean through the teaching of phonics. We use a systematic, synthetic phonics approach following the programme Unlocking Letters and Sounds Programme. In Reception, during the first few weeks, children begin to learn the main sounds heard in the English Language and how they can be represented, as well as learning ‘Common Exception’ words for Phases 2, 3 and 4. They use these sounds to read and write simple words, captions and sentences. Children leave Reception being able to apply the phonemes taught within these phases.
In Year 1 through phonics phases 5a, b and c, they learn alternative spellings and pronunciations for the graphemes they have been taught in Reception and additional Common Exception Words. By the end of Year 1 children will have mastered using phonics to decode and blend when reading and segment when spelling. In Year 1 all children are screened using the national Phonics Screening Check.
In Year 2, phonics continues to be revisited regularly to ensure mastery. Any child who does not meet age related expectations in Year 1 will receive precision teaching to close identified gaps.
To ensure no child is left behind at any point in the progression, children are regularly assessed and supported to catch up through bespoke 1-1 precision teaching, and segmenting and blending interventions. The lowest attaining 20% of pupils are closely monitored to ensure these interventions have impact.
Reading to learn:
Reading to learn can be divided into independent reading and guided / shared reading.
Independent reading:
It is important for children to access texts that are appropriate for their ability in reading in order to enable them to apply the skills taught in phonics as well as other reading skills.
It is essential for our children to have plentiful opportunities to practise and apply their phonics skills. Unlocking Letters and Sounds reading books are allocated to children, based on the phonics phase and set which they are confidently demonstrating in class. This allows the children to practice newly taught graphemes during 1-to-1 reading with teachers and at home with parents and carers. The reading books offer a broad range of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, with engaging illustrations and real-life photographs. Consequently, our children are motivated to apply their phonics as they engage with high-quality texts.
Children who have completed the Unlocking Letters and Sounds programme in Year 2 begin to access books through Accelerated Reader (AR) to encourage and improve reading, measure growth of the individual reader and to provide quality reading for all. It allows for personalised learning targets to be set up and for progress to be easily monitored. Every child taking part in AR will complete a STAR reading test at the beginning of the year and at the end of each big term (3 times per year). It is a twenty-minute multiple choice reading assessment completed individually on the computer. Questions continually adjust to your child’s responses so if their response is correct, the difficulty level is increased. If they miss a question or give an incorrect answer, the difficulty level is reduced. The STAR reading test, along with teacher judgement assists us in identifying a child’s ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) range.
Once a ZPD range has been identified, children are able to independently select a book from a range of high-quality texts that are within their ZPD. Children are then able to take this book home to practise their independent reading with parents and carers. Once they have finished their reading book, children log in to their AR account and answer a series of comprehension questions about their text. The information gathered from these questions enables teachers to ensure that the books they are accessing continue to be in the optimum learning range.
Guided reading:
As well as receiving individual reading books, children who are working on the Unlocking Letters and Sounds programme also use guided reading sets in class. These are designed to be read more than once to help equally focus on decoding skills, fluency, prosody and comprehension. Each set comes with a carefully designed plan to help teachers deliver this successfully. discussions are predominately verbal with some recording beginning in Year 1.
Reading comprehension skills are taught explicitly in Years 2 to 6 in our daily whole class shared reading lessons. These lessons are based on the V.I.P.E.R.S reading skills and focused on a class text. Teachers and pupils focus on one text in each 'big' term. This is to ensure that there is enough time for pupils to delve deeply into the text, connect with characters, understand the underlying themes and learn new vocabulary and grammatical structures. Teachers also supplement their class text with other shorter texts in order to support pupils in their understanding and practise of the reading skills. In KS2 there is a greater focus on written responses to questions showing a progression in comprehension skills in line with the National Curriculum requirements.
Speech and Language:
We recognise that communication is crucial to future success for our children and the development of excellent speaking skills underpins all areas of our curriculum. Vocabulary is explicitly taught through topic work and in guided and shared reading and writing. Talk for Writing provides a structured platform to develop children’s speaking skills. There are also opportunities for children to develop their awareness of an audience through a range of performance activities, including productions, poetry performances, debates, assemblies and presentations.
English Interventions:
We provide a range of support to minimise the gaps in children’s attainment in reading. These include phonic support at sound, sight word, word and sentence level, fluency support, additional guided reading pre-reads, inference training, Rapid Reading and 1:1 reading. Some children have also recently been able to access extra support through the NELI and Lightning Squad interventions, which supports catch up learning.
Supporting reading and phonics at home:
Please read with your child every day to develop their blending, decoding, fluency and comprehension skills. We ask that you record this in their reading log book by writing a positive comment about your child’s reading.
Reading Spine
Reading for pleasure is valued highly at Christ Church. For each class, teachers and pupils have identified numerous 'high-quality' texts for every topic taught in that year group.
We have ensured our selected texts represent a wide range of diversity in both authors and protagonists and are engaging to encourage a love for reading. A diet of fiction and non-fiction is promoted within our Reading Spine.
Each week, a member of the teaching staff will share an extract of their favourite books with pupils in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. This book is then shared with the wider school community through our school newsletter to allow parents to explore this further with children at home.
Foundation Stage and Year 1
We understand that children thrive on repetition and by re-reading stories to children, teachers can deepen their familiarity with a story and increase their emotional engagement. Re-reading allows children to hear new vocabulary over again, which helps them commit the meaning of new words into their long-term memory. Additionally, children have new opportunities to connect with characters and their feelings, and to relive the excitement and emotion of stories. As such, children in the Foundation Stage will re-read their class 'reading for pleasure' books several times over the course of a term to enable them to explore the language and emotions more deeply.
Reading Statement of Impact
Children at Christ Church, love reading; they love listening to stories; they love sharing books with their friends; they love “escaping” with a book themselves.
As we believe that reading is key to all learning, the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the result of statutory assessments. Children have the opportunity to enter the wide and varied magical worlds that reading opens up to them. As they develop their own interest in books, a deep love of literature across a range of genres cultures and styles is enhanced.
Through the teaching of systematic phonics and reading enquiry, our aim is for children to become fluent and confident readers who can apply their knowledge and experience to a range of texts through the Key Stage 2 curriculum.
As a Year 6 reader, transitioning into secondary school, we aspire that children are fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning and all areas of the curriculum. Our parents support the children by regularly sharing books at home and contributing to their reading records.