Reading
The reading journey of our learners is carefully curated by knowledgeable staff and leaders. The road to reading is long and varied with learners beginning at the point of interpretation of single letter shapes and associated sounds and moving through to becoming discerning readers using their knowledge for their own reading pleasure or further accumulation of subject knowledge. By the end of their primary school journey, we want to have fostered a life-long love of reading that will open the door to a multitude of pathways and experiences of discovery.
Reading Lessons
Children are taught in individual and guided reading sessions, led by an adult. Teachers select texts carefully, linking these to other areas of the curriculum or chosen for their ability to engage or inspire the reader and these are shared with the whole class. Initial phonics teaching sessions focus on the decoding of letters as symbols and words as children learn to read. The focus shifts towards the children’s understanding and appreciation of the texts they are reading as they become more fluent readers and they begin to develop the skills of retrieval, explanation of authorial intent, inference, prediction and summarising. In guided reading sessions, children may be sharing a book, poem, newspaper article or any other text relevant to their year group curriculum or expansion of their reading world. This enables the children to read, listen and really understand the meaning of the texts. It is also an important opportunity for children to share their thoughts and ideas and to learn from one another.
Shared texts
Class novels are read to the children regularly. These texts are chosen to expand the horizons of the children through the content or viewpoint they offer, with the reading process modelled and guided by the teacher.
Reading at home
Children are encouraged to read books targeted to their reading level to help the development of their reading and to select books that interest them to read with parents at home. Teachers use reading records to monitor engagement with reading at home. Children and parents are encouraged to read at home on a daily basis and to have conversations about what they have been reading. We want this time to show children that reading can be an enjoyable, shared activity that stimulates conversation as well as ensuring that children have a good understanding of what they have read and supporting them to decode the words.
Assessment
The assessment of reading is a constant and ongoing process that happens in many different forms:
- Teachers hear children read. This could be taking place one to one, on an individual basis (e.g. from a reading book at their level of understanding, from class work as teachers support at the point of learning), or through children reading aloud to the class (e.g. text on an interactive whiteboard during a lesson, from a class reading text).
- Teachers watch children when they are reading. They support and guide children when they read: noting habits, asking questions and assessing book choices with the children.
- In phonics, assessment takes place during daily lessons and with summative assessments at key points every term.
- Star reader – from year 2 and throughout KS2, children take star reader assessments 4 times a year (September baseline, term 2, term 4 and term 6). Reports generate pictures of the children as readers and support identification of children’s needs.
- Reading lessons – teachers select texts and questions that assess pupils’ articulation of their understanding of specific texts and reading abilities, both written and orally.
Using tests and teacher assessments we track all children’s progress in reading. Children not on-track to achieve the ‘expected’ level for their age are quickly identified. These children may begin to read every day for a short time with an adult in school or they may be placed on our ‘Rapid Reading’ intervention.