Reading and Phonics
‘Reading is a passport to countless adventures.’ Mary Pope Osborne
Intent
At Barley Mow Primary School we are determined that every pupil will learn to read. We believe reading is the key for future learning and that ensuring children are proficient readers will enable them to access the entire curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that children learn to read rapidly, regardless of their background and enjoy reading for pleasure. With this in mind, we aim to inspire a true love of reading, whereby our children are enthusiastic, fluent and motivated readers who feel confident about talking about books and authors. We want every child to be passionate about reading, be hungry to read widely and often, and have the desire to want to learn to read for themselves with a view to becoming lifelong readers. We are sequential in our approach to the reading curriculum which follows the National Curriculum.
We believe that a quality reading curriculum should develop children’s love of reading as well as equipping them with the skills to become confident, capable readers and writers who have their own voice and style. We have a rigorous and well-organised English curriculum that provides many exciting, purposeful opportunities for reading, using a range of genre and media. Our curriculum closely follows the aims of the National Curriculum for English 2014 to enable all children to:
● read easily, fluently and with good understanding
● develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
● acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
● appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
Implementation
At Barley Mow Primary school, we strive to foster a love of reading through introducing children to a range of exciting and challenging texts from different genres and cultures. We review the texts we use regularly in line the changing needs and interests of our children. We have developed reading spines for each year group which include core texts studied within each year group, texts that children will read for pleasure as a class and a selection of 20 suggested texts that children could read at home. Please see the links at the bottom of the page for further details of our reading curriculum and reading spines.
Across the school, our learning in English and reading lessons is based on the use of high quality texts. Children read regularly in all areas of the curriculum and in every part of the school day. Please see our Reading Policy for details of how we teach reading at Barley Mow Primary School.
Phonics
Phonics is given high priority at Barley Mow Primary School with daily phonics teaching in Early Years and in Key Stage 1. Children in our Nursery classes take part in small group phonics sessions which lead to proficiency in the discrimination between varieties of founds, ensuring a positive start to their reading careers. In Early Years and Key Stage One, our phonics scheme is delivered using the Letters and Sounds approach, implemented using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds (Revised) – our chosen Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme. Children are routinely assessed on their ability to recognise graphemes (letters), to blend and segment phonemes (sounds), leading to development of skill in reading captions and sentences. We provide extra intervention where this needed through early identification of children who may need additional support through 1:1 and/or group Keep Up sessions and additional 1:1 reading sessions. Please also see our Phonics and Early Reading Policy for further information and the Little Wandle Website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ .
Further Information:
Capital Letter Formation
Phase 2 Autumn 1 Pronunciation
Phase 2 Autumn 2 Pronunciation
Reading Books
Children in Reception and Year 1 are given a book from the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Scheme. The books are decodable and matched to children’s phonic knowledge. Books are read three times a week at school in Reading Practice sessions (see our Early Reading and Phonics for details). Children in need of additional support receive extra 1:1 reading sessions during the week. Books are sent home each Friday and should be returned to school each Monday.
Once the children have finished Little Wandle phonics, they are given a reading book from either the Oxford Reading Tree or Project X schemes. These books are both fiction and non-fiction texts. Books are ordered progressively and banded. When children are reading at a Dark Red level, they can become free readers.
All children take home a sharing book to read for pleasure with their parent or carer each week.
Reading in Key Stage 2 and Year 2
Once children have finished the Little Wandle Phonics Programme in Year 2, children will take part in a carousel of daily reading activities designed to continue to encourage fluency, prosody and understanding of the text through teacher-led and independent comprehension activities. In these sessions, staff will hear children read. In addition to this, we hear children in Year 2 read their home reader independently.
In Key Stage Two, children will read a wide selection of carefully selected fiction, non-fiction and poetry books over the course of the year in whole class reading sessions which occur four times a week. These sessions have been carefully designed to help the children focus on a different aspect of reading each day whilst also allowing the children to explore a text in-depth with their peers and teacher across a half term. We develop the knowledge needed to understand increasingly challenging texts by:
- Developing children’s knowledge of the world
- Building breadth and depth in vocabulary knowledge
- Teaching and scaffolding the application of comprehension strategies
- Exploring grammatical relationships (develop knowledge of syntax:word order, use of pronouns and sentence structure)
- Developing knowledge of text structure.
Once a week, children in Key Stage two, have an opportunity to look at and answer questions about a secondary text. These texts have been carefully selected to support the children’s understanding of the whole class reading text we are currently studying, or to the wider curriculum. We are constantly reviewing the text types we use with the children to reflect their needs and interests.
Comprehension skills are also taught during English lessons. In addition to having access to a range of different texts, many of our English units are based around texts to help the children to develop their understanding and emulation of different authorial styles and genre.
External Support
We are proud to be part of the Connecting Stories Partnership and The Puffin World of Stories Programme this year.
Further Information:
Please also see our Phonics and Early Reading Policy
Phonics and Early Reading Policy
The link below provides useful videos and information for parents/ carers
https://www.littlewandlelettersand sounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
Whole Class Reading Curriculum Map 2022
Nursery Reading Spine
Reception Reading Spine
Year 1 Reading Spine
Year 2 Reading Spine
Year 3 Reading Spine
Year 4 Reading Spine
Year 5 Reading Spine
Year 6 Reading Spine
