Reading

We aim to develop reading to provide our pupils with life skills whilst also promoting reading for pleasure and enjoyment. We strongly believe that reading opens many doors for our children. It helps to improve their language and vocabulary, stimulates their imagination and gives them the opportunity to gain new experiences. Therefore, it is our aim to create confident, independent readers who develop good learning skills and a range of interests. Reading for pleasure contributes to educational success and we focus on equipping our children with the necessary skills, as well as developing a lifelong love of 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.

The children:

• learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letters/letter groups using simple picture prompts
• learn to read words using ‘Fred talk’ and sound blending
• read from a range of storybooks and non-fictions books matched to their phonic knowledge
• work well with partners
• develop comprehension skills in stories by answering ‘Fastest Finger’ and ‘Have a think’ discussion questions.

As a school we teach phonic and early reading skills through a scheme called “Read Write Inc”.

Please click here to find out more information on our approach to teaching phonics.

• Finedon Schools Approach to Teaching Phonics
• RWI teaching progression
• Fred Games
• Support for Reading at home with Read Write Inc Booklet 1
• Support for Reading at home with Read Write Inc Booklet 2

When the children move off the RWI phonics programme, our focus, during daily, whole class reading lessons, is to build fluency and understanding.  During lessons, we ensure children can easily read through a text without stumbling over words or sounding ‘choppy’ and awkward.  This is done through:

• Reading aloud daily
• The application of phonic knowledge through ‘stretching and saying’ words
• Reading words on sight
• Learning and understanding ambitious vocabulary
• Echo reading
• Reading independently
• Additional 1:1 reading opportunities with teaching assistants, teachers, volunteers and peers.

We recognise the importance of supporting children to become fluent readers in order to focus on understanding.  This is because we know that when they are struggling to pronounce or decode words, they cannot give the necessary attention to understanding the text. 

During whole class reading lessons we teach the children to understand the texts they have read in two ways: in the moment of reading (book talk) and proving understanding through answering questions.

In the moment of reading

We explicitly plan for, teach and display the following comprehension strategies to support pupils’ understanding in the moment of reading through:

1. Using background knowledge / activating prior knowledge – this includes children making connections. We widen the children’s experiences, through real life, images and videos
2. Using knowledge of vocabulary to find the definition to unknown words through making links to words they already know or within the context of a sentence.
3. Making links between important words and phrases in text to have an overall gist.
4. Becoming active readers by making predictions or asking questions
5. Fixing errors or misunderstandings by ensuring pupils are aware of what they do understand, identify what they do not understand and use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension
6. Inferring meaning

As children become more accomplished readers, we develop skills so that pupils gain the ability to prove their understanding of a text by answering different question types.   Pupils are taught explicitly how to answer these question types and modelling is used effectively to ensure pupils are aware of what a good answer looks like. These reading strands and different question foci include:

1. Retrieval
2. Summarising
3. Inference
4. Prediction
5. Sequencing
6. Language / vocabulary development
7. Comparison

Reading lessons focus on improving one or more of these.  We use a variety of extracts, poems and novels to do this.  Visual literacy is used regularly to support.  Teacher modelling is at the heart of all comprehension strategies and is evident in all reading lessons.  We use high-quality structured interventions to support pupils who are not making progress.  The gaps and barriers to their learning are addressed within these interventions.

Please click here to see the KS2 reading lesson texts.

Children in Key Stage 2 will be given a book to take home each day which is broadly in line with their current reading ability. For information on our reading scheme please click here.

It is helpful if parents can write a comment in the reading record books to keep us up to date on how children are getting on with their reading at home. We expect children to bring their reading books into school each day.

Developing confident readers is one of our school priorities and we greatly appreciate parental support in this area.

At Finedon Schools, we know that reading is an open door to all other learning opportunities. Our children know that reading frequently makes them a good reader, and being a good reader expands their world. Fundamentally, we want our School to be a place where children are read to, enjoy, discuss and work with high quality books.  Therefore, we place reading and books at the centre of our curriculum.  We promote a love of reading throughout the schools, one of the way we do this is by selecting engaging and exciting, high-quality and challenging texts which cover a range of genres and include cross-curricular links if appropriate.

We have carefully selected a range of books which provide pupils with a rich reading experience as they move through our school. Alongside our rigorous Read Write Inc phonics programme which teaches pupils how to decode the words on a page, we develop pupils’ language comprehension through our reading spine.  This spine provides a sequence of carefully selected, high quality, language rich texts which provides the children with progressively more challenging texts.  Every class has a daily 20-minute story time session where they are fully immersed into the current class read.  Below, we have set out the texts which are studied and enjoyed by pupils as they progress through our reading curriculum.

KS1 spine books: Reading Spine - Class Reads

KS2 spine books: Reading Spine - Class Reads

To see a copy of our reading strategy, which explains our approach to reading in greater detail please click here.

To see our reading progression document please click here.