Reading

Intent:

At St Joseph’s, we believe that ability to read is fundamental to our children succeeding; enabling them to access the next stage of their education and beyond. Our curriculum has been designed to ensure that pupils have opportunities to develop a lifelong love of reading. Our aim is to ensure that pupils gain a thirst for reading a range of genres and participating in discussions about the books; exploring the language used by different authors and the impact the written words have on the reader. Our curriculum has also been designed to ensure that pupils not only read for pleasure but to use books to research and gather new knowledge to extend their understanding.

Implementation:

Reading is an important part of our curriculum and is an integral part of all of our lessons. At St Joseph’s we teach reading through:

• Read Write Inc. daily phonics lesson Upper Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2
• Read Write Inc. Comprehension – Year 2
• Cracking Comprehension – Discreet comprehension lessons: We teach lessons which focus on developing pupils’ level of understanding of the text, through discussion, written and oral tasks; and the exploration of new vocabulary. Pupils will be taught to retrieve, infer, predict, summarise, analyse and evaluate.
• Everyone Reading in Class (ERIC). Children have the opportunity, daily, to read a book of their choice. Teachers are also encouraged to join in with independent reading at this time too.
• Magic of stories and repeated reads
• Library resources: A librarian from the local library will visit EYFS for story time. Years one to year six visit the local library for a book related workshop. This encourages children to sign up for their own library card and to visit with their own families. Cross- curricular books are also loaned to school each term and are linked to the topics taught in each class.
• Book fairs/donations: The Travelling Book Company visit school each year and a % of all books sales provides the school with new resources.
• World Book Day – theatre workshops

Reading in school

Each Key Stage within the school focuses on age appropriate skills and uses a range of strategies and interventions to support the pupils.

In EYFS and Key Stage 1, our children learn to read with Read Write Inc. Phonics, a very popular and successful literacy programme.

Your child will learn to read in a very accessible way. He or she will learn to:

1. Read letters by their ‘sounds’
2. Blend these sounds into words
3. Read words in a story

Set 2 reading in school

https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/fqHq9n15/VkKvSbsd

Set 2 spelling in school

https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/E8NaqyBu/OymsBXAB

Read and hold a sentence

https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/mvSLwgFG/9xRjEjOA

In Year 2, where children have completed the Read Write Inc. Scheme, children take part in a daily comprehension lesson. This lesson prepares children for the higher expectations of the Year 2 literacy curriculum. The programme uses the same proven systematic approach in Phonics, developed by Ruth Miskin (RWI founder), to develop children’s reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and composition.

Reading:

Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

As a school, we believe children should be exposed to a range of texts which explore different concepts. We have been fortunate enough to invest in new books for each class which are recommended reads from the Books for Topics website.

Books for topics say, “Each of our Year Group Recommended Reads lists contains 50 books specially picked out for reading for pleasure in each primary year group, from Preschool to Year 6. The lists are designed to provide recommendations of age-appropriate and accessible books across a range of genres and styles.”

Have a look at some of the books our children might be reading here:

https://www.booksfortopics.com/ages/

We have also been fortunate to enough to implement a reading shed in our Key Stage 1 playground. Children have access to different books and texts each playtime, via the shed, as well as in lessons and additional reading time.

Here is how it works:

Impact:

• Through the systematic synthetic teaching of phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One. This way, children can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school. Attainment in reading is measured using the statutory assessments at the end of Key Stage One and Two. These results are measured against the reading attainment of children nationally.

Phonics:

• Staff assess children’s learning during daily phonics lessons and daily intervention.
• Half termly checks are carried out to ensure that pupils are making good progress and are placed within the correct teaching group.
• Phonics Screening Test is carried out at the end of Year 1.

Reading:

• The school measures impact through:
• Termly assessments
• Half termly Read Write Inc. assessments
• Previous SATs papers in year 2 and year 6 to measure attainment against national standardised scores
• Pupil Voice interviews to assess learning