St Bede’s Catholic Primary School Reading Vision
At St. Bede’s Catholic Primary school, we believe that every child should leave our school with a love and enthusiasm to read at a high standard.
It is imperative that, as a school, we foster the children’s love of reading through a rich selection of genres and authors, capturing the children’s imagination and enjoyment. Our children will be able to talk about their favourite books and authors with confidence and enjoyment.
Reading will be taught to a high standard from an early age, developing their phonetic knowledge, fluency, language and comprehension skills. We will provide the children with a high quality selection of classic and modern reads, developing their curiosity and thirst for knowledge and understanding of their own and other cultures.
Our children will read because they want to.
Early Reading
We foster a love for reading from an early age at St Bede’s Catholic Primary School, starting with our F1 children through high quality story times and rhymes. Through the sharing of books and rhymes we are introducing the foundations for building and developing the children’s vocabulary and understanding. Developing quality opportunities for talk and listening enables us to develop the children’s vocabulary and understanding from an early age. Children take books home to share at home as soon as they join us at school in F1. Reading for pleasure continues throughout school with all F2 children and Key Stage 1 children taking home a reading for pleasure book alongside their RWI reading books. We offer a wide range of genres across school to promote and foster a love for reading allowing children to select the books they wish to read.
Phonics
We follow the Read Write Inc. Phonics synthetic phonics programme with daily phonics lessons beginning from the start of Reception. They learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. The children also practise reading (and spelling) what we call ‘tricky words’, such as ‘once,’ ‘have,’ ‘said’ and ‘where’. The children practise their reading with books that match the phonics and the ‘tricky words’ they know. Children are assessed regularly and are placed into specific RWI groups based on their RWI assessment.
Read Write Inc. Information for parents Parents and Carers - Ruth Miskin Literacy
Teaching Reading
Reading skills will be taught through a combination of one-to-one reading, independent reading and whole class comprehension lessons. The approach to the teaching of reading encompasses the following key areas:
- Following the Read Write Inc. program, adopting a synthetic approach to the teaching of phonics: taught both in isolation as necessary, in addition to, the context of the wider curriculum.
- Mapping in detail the curriculum, to ensure full coverage of the national curriculum for reading, and that texts have strong links to writing outcomes and topics.
- Exposing pupils to a range of written genres and to increase their opportunities for writing, so as to enable children to revisit learning and embed knowledge and skills.
- Developing fluency in reading to free cognitive working memory from word recognition to support with comprehension.
- Allow children to access a balance of non-fiction, fiction and poetry from high-quality texts across the curriculum and within the classroom.
- KS2 pupils read a range of age appropriate texts which they select from our reading areas to take home.
- Teachers select quality texts; published journals and reports; and other media sources to develop pupils’ understanding of authorial intent, the world beyond their own experience, current affairs, cultural capital and an appreciation of both classic texts and contemporary literature.
- There is explicitly taught vocabulary which is crucial to the context and understanding of the reading texts.
- Integrating exam styled question stems in comprehension reading sessions, to further prepare pupils for iterative tests and develop important comprehension skills such as fact retrieval and inference.
- Assessment is carried out across school for pupils in order to inform teaching, monitor progress and identify where further support may be required to ensure good progress is made. Assessment is carried out through the use of; frequent RWI assessments for children following the program; end of key stage assessment papers are used for the relevant year groups and children working within them and NFER papers are used termly to support teacher assessment. Pupil progress meetings allow SLT to monitor progress and attainment across all year groups with careful monitoring of the lowest 20% children and the adaptations being made for these children.
Home Reading
Children are encouraged to read regularly at home and this is recorded in their home reading planners. Children begin taking books home when they start in nursery, encouraging the children to pick a library book to share with their adult at home. From Reception children take home the RWI books which are matched with their phonetic ability to decode words. Children in Reception and Key Stage One also take home a weekly reading for pleasure book which is to be shared with their adult at home, providing opportunities for them to hear books read aloud at home.
On completing of the RWI programme children take home a colour banded book from purple to white, once reading at and above Year 2 secure age-related expectation, children take home one of our Key Stage Home Reading books which are age related reads. Children are able to select from a range of genres for home reading and in Key Stage 2 our children are also familiar with our Dyslexia friendly texts ensuring reading is accessible to all our readers.
Interventions Supporting Reading
In order to develop children’s reading skills we have a number of reading interventions in place which are used to scaffold children’s learning. In Foundation Stage and Key Stage One, children who are not working at age related within the RWI programme follow Fast Track Tutoring which may be delivered as 1:1 or as part of a small group. Children who have been identified as requiring further support with comprehension or fluency will work as a small group following the HFL Reading Fluency Project or will have a specific comprehension skills focus group.
In Key Stage Two, children who did not complete the RWI programme in Year 2 will continue to follow the programme as they enter Year 3. In Year 5 and Year 6, children who are not reading at age related are assessed using the Fresh Start Programme and complete the relevant modules based on their assessment. Children who have completed RWI or who are not making good progress with the programme in Key Stage Two may follow; Over Learning Program, HFL Reading Fluency Project, comprehension skills based work, Dyslexia group or Reading Rescue. Through careful monitoring of reading progress with class teachers and the SENDCo, it is identified if children are progressing with their current reading intervention or if an alternative adaptation or intervention is required to meet their needs.
Promoting Reading Throughout School
School promote a love for reading by reading daily to their class, encourage discussions about the text and other books which have been read by the children. There is a Storytime club for KS1, introducing children to new texts and encouraging talk about the books. Texts which are used across the curriculum are carefully selected by teachers to ensure there is an engagement and want for reading. Reading comprehension lessons cover a range of text genres, exposing children to a wide range of reading genres available. We have purchased this years current Blue Peter Book Club books, with a number of our children applying for the Blue Peter Book Club badge. They can wear the badge on their uniform, encouraging children to talk about the texts they have read. We celebrate World Book Day in school, inspiring children to be creative in their representations of their favourite books and dressing up biannually. Children have been involved in virtual author visits where they have had the chance to ask authors about the texts they have read and find out more about them. Books are displayed throughout school in an inviting manner which is easy for children to see what is available and dyslexia friendly texts are incorporated into the collections. Our annual Book Fair is always popular with our families and children.
