English Reading

The ability to read is fundamental to children’s development as independent learners and has a direct effect on progress in all areas of the curriculum. Reading aids children’s understanding of the world as well as supporting their emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual development whilst also allowing their imagination to take them to new worlds. Therefore, reading is one of the highest priorities in our school and we explicitly teach our pupils the importance of reading to a successful later life.

From Reception, children are taught synthetic phonics following the Little Wandle scheme to allow them to decode written letters and spoken sounds. With a strong knowledge of phonemes and their corresponding graphemes provides children with a core foundation on which they can develop their skills in reading as they move through the school. Children are taught to apply their phonics to segment and blend phonemes in unfamiliar words to read and also to segment sounds in a word in order to write the correct graphemes. From Year 2 upwards, emphasis is placed on using phonics to spell and the teaching of spelling rules.

Alongside decoding and word reading skills, children will be taught the skills of comprehension to gain a deeper understanding of what they are reading.

We aim to instill a love of reading from a young age and promote reading for pleasure throughout the school, we endeavour to encourage all children to read and appreciate a wide range of our literary heritage. We emphasise the importance of story time and children are read to daily. As part of pupil voice they participate in choosing this daily book which frequently links directly to that weeks topic learning. 

Throughout the year we hold events to promote reading for pleasure e.g., World Book Day, Author visits, Summer reading challenges.

The school library is often restocked with new and exciting books and offers a comfortable space for children to read and choose books.  We were delighted to be accepted on the World of Stories cohort, 2023-2024 which included a delivery of 500 new books as well as additional training for staff and opportunities for the children.

Classes get to visit the school library and children are encouraged to take books home to enjoy with their families. From Reception class they choose to take a weekly book from the class library aswell as their reading book through the Little Wandle scheme. We are currently developing our relationship with the local library.

Families are actively encouraged to take part in children’s reading development and are expected to read with their children at home. Families will have opportunities to learn strategies to support their children in decoding in comprehension skills throughout their school career and we offer workshops for parents through the year.