Welcome to the Reading Page

Our intent at Eastrington Primary School is to ensure all children develop their reading skills and nurture a love of reading. One of our priorities is to help children to read with confidence, fluency and understanding, extending their vocabulary, imagination and inventiveness. We aim to fully equip children with the foundations of reading by developing a range of decoding and comprehension skills. We provide high quality texts and authors that feed pupils imagination and inspire them to apply their reading skills to other areas of English, such as speaking, communication and writing.

Implementation

Pupils in Foundation Stage and KS1 have daily phonics lessons enabling children to learn to decode efficiently. Teachers model reading strategies during shared reading sessions, whilst children have the opportunity to develop reading strategies and to discuss texts in detail. As the children move through the school, opportunities to read independently for a sustained period of time are afforded to them.

A range of reading schemes are used to support early readers and Key Stage 1 as well as ‘real books’, all of which are organised by phonics phases and later, coloured book bands. The school has a very successful reading reward scheme which enables the children to collect bronze, silver and gold awards for reading at home. These awards are presented to the children in the Friday awards assembly.

In Key Stage 2, children continue to choose books to take home and read from the banded books and then progress onto free readers. Each child has a home school reading record that teachers and parents can use to share information about a child’s reading. Parents are encouraged to read with their children which, we believe not only helps to develop inferential skills, but also supports a lifelong love of reading.

Whole school reading focused activities are planned throughout the year to promote the pleasure and variety of books, i.e. ‘Love that Book’ weeks and ‘World Book Day’.

In the Foundation Stage, the teaching of reading is initially done as shared reading with the class teachers and Nursery Nurse. Children then begin to participate in short guided reading sessions when and where appropriate later in the academic year. As the children progress through KS1 and KS2 high quality texts are used with a whole class approach, to aid and inspire the curriculum. Children are taught to recognise and answer different types of questions using VIPERS (Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve, Summarise).

Classroom and school displays promote reading, suggesting authors and texts and support children’s understanding of vocabulary.

Accurate ongoing assessments are used to track pupil’s progress and are supported termly by the use of formal PIRA assessments to ensure application.

Impact

The impact of our text rich curriculum and promotion of reading will help to develop children as life long readers. Our children will be able to:

Demonstrate a love or appreciation of reading and talk confidently about a range of genres and authors.
Enjoy reading and be confident to read aloud in front of others.
Have a widened vocabulary and apply strategies confidently to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Understand what they have read and talk confidently about their learning in reading.
Develop their imaginations and actively engage with a range of texts.
Confidently apply their reading skills across other areas of learning.