Reading

Reading plays a vital role in the development and education of your child. Here at Flore CE Primary, we ensure that pupils have lots of opportunities to read in lots of different contexts, through a text-rich, progressive curriculum. We continually strive to promote a love of reading in every child! We understand that reading cannot be viewed as a single skill, but rather a complex combination of different skills and abilities that develop progressively. We develop children’s reading ability through discrete teaching and by providing opportunities for repeated practise to ensure all pupils are able to read for understanding and pleasure.

At Flore CE Primary School we are truly passionate about reading. Your child's reading experience is much more than the reading book which comes home from school. Reading is happening all the time in a classroom and in the school. It is taught in specific reading and English lessons, but children are practising and using their 'reading' constantly across all subjects too.

Parents can support this 'reading journey' through regular reading at home. Reading to and with your child every evening for at least ten minutes can make a dramatic difference to a child's achievement within school. A report from the Oxford University Press highlighted the importance of parents reading with their children. 'Children who read outside of class are 13 times more likely to read above the expected level for their age'.

The National Curriculum

The programmes of study for reading at key stages 1 and 2 consist of 2 dimensions:

Word reading (please see our separate Phonics page for more information on Early Reading).
Comprehension (both listening and reading)

It is essential that teaching focuses on developing pupils’ competence in both dimensions; different kinds of teaching are needed for each.

Phonics / Early Reading

At Flore CE Primary School, we show fidelity to the Little Wandle: Letters and Sounds Revised scheme as our platform to teach early reading. The scheme, taught from Reception to Year 1, is used to teach children that sounds are represented by letters and that these sounds can be blended together to form words.

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

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, 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 sessions for any child in Year 2 or 3 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.

 If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing
gaps.These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.

Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions three times a week

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

- are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of children

- use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments. These books have been produced by Harper Collins and are explicitly matched to the Little Wandle scheme
- 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:

- 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 Year 2, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing
books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops