At Hady Primary, we value reading as a key life skill. We are dedicated to enabling all of our learners to become lifelong readers. Through providing a language rich environment as well as high quality, diverse texts, all children will have the opportunity to acquire and develop essential reading skills.

Children will apply these reading skills in a range of subjects across the curriculum and, as a result, develop their curiosity about the world around them.

We intend to have our pupils leaving Hady as lifelong readers, who have an instilled love of reading in them. For this to happen, we understand that children need to:

• be read to regularly
• have access to books
• have choice in what to read
• have trusted adults and peers recommend books
• have fun reading experiences
• have time to read

Experiences in reading will link closely to writing, with children developing a vivid imagination and ambitious vocabulary. By the time our children leave us in Year 6, we expect that they have become fluent and competent readers who can recommend books to their peers, want to explore new texts and genres and participate confidently in discussions about books.

Foundations for phonics in Nursery

We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘communication and language’ and ‘literacy’. These include:

• Sharing high-quality stories and poems.
• Learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes.
• Activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending.
• Attention to high-quality language.

• Foundation stage 1 follows the Little Wandle phonics scheme which ensures Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception by covering all aspects of phase 1 phonics repeatedly.

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Years 1 and 2

We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.

• Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in week 2 of the autumn term.
• We follow the Little Wandle ‘letters and sounds revised’ expectations of progress:

• Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
• Children in Year 1 review phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

Daily keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

• Any child who needs additional practice has daily keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.

• We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or above who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle ‘letters and sounds revised’ assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the keep-up resources – at pace.

Early reading

The Little Wandle approach to teaching reading is used throughout Reception and Years 1and 2.

We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These sessions:

• are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
• use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle ‘letters and sounds revised’ assessments and book matching grids on pages 11–20 of ‘application of phonics to reading’
• are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis

Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills.

• Decoding.
• Prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression.
• Comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

In Reception, these sessions start in week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.  In Years 2 and 3, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

Moving on from phonics…

Once children have completed the Little Wandle programme they have reading lessons that continue to develop fluency to perform/read aloud and ensure that the skills of fluency and comprehension are explicitly taught so that children are enabled to comprehend what they read at a deeper level.

These sessions allow children to hear good models of reading aloud through echo reading and text marking to phrase and highlight punctuation. Practice and re-reading enables children to be confident and competent when reading aloud.

Book study

Key stage 2 lessons are based on high quality texts, both short extracts and longer class novels in book study. The skills taught include retrieval of key information, inference, vocabulary, sequencing, predicting, understanding the intent of the author and making links between texts. This develops the children’s comprehension strategies and deepens understanding of a range of high quality texts.

Reading at home

All children have the opportunity to visit our fantastic library and take home a book to read at home either with an adult or independently.

Children who are not yet fluent, will bring home a fully decodable phonics book that they have read in school to practise at home. Once they move off these books, they may bring a fluency practice book home to practise automaticity and prosody. When the teacher thinks they are able, they will be a free reader and will be able to read their library book with an adult or independently.

 

 How to support developing readers at home

• Try to listen to and read with your child regularly, 10 minutes a day is better than a longer session once a week. It can help if a regular time is set aside so that it becomes part of a routine.
• Find a quiet place to share books where you can feel comfortable and relaxed – learning to read needs to be a positive experience - build their confidence by praising their efforts.
• Encourage your child to have a go at reading words, by using phonic skills to read any unfamiliar words, and by working on building up their sight vocabulary.
• Talk about the meanings of words to help to develop your child’s understanding and use of language.
• Encourage your child to read a range of texts such as stories, newspapers, comics, labels, poetry, non-fiction, tickets, signs, leaflets etc.
• Read books to your child as well; if they see you enjoying a book it will encourage and motivate them to want to learn to read.
• Ask them questions about the text to develop their understanding.

 Questions to Develop Understanding:

• Where/when does the story take place?
• Who are the characters in the story?
• What happens in this part of the story?
• Tell me one/two things that the main character does in this part of the story?
• Can you retell the story using your own words?
• Tell me what this character was like?
• Tell me the most interesting/ exciting/ funniest/ your favourite part of the story? Why?
• What do you think the character feels about...? How can you tell?
• What do you think would have happened if…?
• What do you think is going to happen next?
• Which part of this book did you like best/least? Why?
• How has the author used words/phrases to make this character funny/ sad/ clever/ frightening/ excited etc?
• Why is … a good title for this story/book/chapter/play?
• Do you know any more stories like this? Tell me how they are alike.
• Do you know another story with similar characters in? Tell me how they are similar?
• What do you think this story is trying to tell us?
• Has anything like this ever happened to you?

 Non Fiction Questions

• Tell me two things you found out that you didn’t know before?
• What does this part of the text tell us about ….?
• Which part of the text tells us about …?
• Why are some words in bold?
• How does this text/ layout help the reader?
• How does (a diagram/picture/caption) help you to understand the information on this page?