Developing Young Readers

We have recently updated our teaching approach to Reading.

We recognise that reading is the most fundamental skill that we can teach our pupils that underpins their entire learning journey. Successful readers access curriculum content more effectively. We dedicate significant teaching time to reading and the stories that we teach become a central part of our curriculum. The reading skills and spoken language that our children acquire allow them to approach all curriculum subjects with confidence and enrich their lives beyond school. Our rigorous approach to teaching Phonics ensures that our pupils become confident readers from an early age which equips them to tackle increasingly challenging texts and comprehension tasks. Our Keep Up Not Catch Up strategy, ensures that no child is left behind. Our approach to teaching reading incorporates oracy, drama and high quality texts which develop children’s vocabulary and reading skills. Carefully planned progression ensures that children are exposed to increasingly challenging texts and are taught to use a wide range of comprehension skills. The answering of comprehension questions is explicitly modelled in order to provide pupils with the skills to independently tackle any comprehension task within school or beyond. We instil a lifelong love of reading through our carefully chosen whole class texts, the promotion of rewards and challenges and our whole school reading culture, where every day we hold whole class story time. Children are encouraged to see the value of stories as a special part of their learning journey.

Agreed Teaching principles for Reading

• Children experience daily high quality Phonics lessons from day one
• Children have matched home reading practice books
• Keep Up Not Catch Up strategy to ensure no child is left behind in reading
• High quality class texts are used to teach a wide range of comprehension, literacy and vocabulary
• Word clarification and pre-teach allows pupils to expand their vocabulary in Reading lessons and across the wider curriculum
• Explicit modelling of comprehension strategies underpins the reading process

Teaching Approaches for Reading

• Shared Reading (explicit teaching of comprehension skills through high quality texts)
• Read, Write Inc Phonics (systematic teaching of reading, spelling and handwriting)
• Accelerated Reader (motivates pupils to read with independence and allows teachers to closely monitor reading standards for progression)
• Reading Spine (exposes pupils to a range of classic authors and modern texts

How do we measure the impact?

• Accelerated Reader quizzes to assess comprehension and understanding
• Reading Spine progression
• NFER and SATs to support benchmarking against national standards
• Shared reading comprehension during the lesson
• Tracking of RWI Phonics progressions every 6-8 weeks
• 1:1 Reading sessions 
• Certificates and Awards