Reading is the most important skill we can teach children in order for them to succeed throughout the curriculum and their education. Our scheme develops early reading rapidly, and supports children who require further repetition and support, through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonics programme. This will be taught from EYFS.

Intent

Our aim at St Oswald’s is not only to ensure children can read, but also that children develop a love of reading. In the business of modern life, reading helps children to develop their imaginations, relax and develop their vocabulary. A child who reads at home, for 20 minutes a day is exposed to 1,800,000 words over a year, compared to 282,000 for children reading 5 minutes each day. The power and impact of reading is colossal and is the greatest gift we can give our children. We want the time you spend reading with your child at home, to be a special and pleasurable experience for parents, children and the whole family!

Implementation

To support this, we have a collection of books that will be available to your child to take home from their class library. These books are not from a reading scheme, they are a wide variety of age appropriate, beautiful books, which we know the children will love.

All children, regardless of their reading ability, will bring a reading for pleasure book home each week. How the child accesses the text, will be dependent on where they are on their reading journey. For example, your child may read the book aloud to you, listen to the book read aloud by an adult, or participate in turn taking and shared reading with parents or carers. Whichever way your child engages with the text is perfectly fine, the important thing is that they are exposed to a wide variety of rich texts, language and genres. For shorter texts, we advise that you read these books again with your child, as through repetition children engage with the text in different ways.

Children who are working through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonics programme will also bring home a fully decodable book, to practise their phonics skills. If you have any questions about your child’s reading, please do not hesitate to contact their teacher or any member of our English team. We hope that you enjoy being part of your child’s reading journey this year and in the years to come.

Please see our Phonics and Early Reading policy below for more in depth detail on our teaching of phonics and video links to help your child with the correct pronunciation of digraphs and trigraphs.

Thriving on repetition

It is not just the number of different stories children listen to that matters. On each re-reading, their familiarity with a story deepens and, with that, comes a greater emotional engagement. When children ask for a story to be re-read, in effect they are asking for another chance to explore the language, the characters and their feelings, and to relive the emotions they felt on the first reading. They hear the same words read in the same way and gain a sense of comfort in knowing what follows. They wait for their favourite bits, ready to join in or ready to be scared, even when they already know what happens. Their attachment to the story equips them to retell it, and when they have learnt to read, encourages them to read it for themselves.

[Dfe Reading Framework: Teaching the foundations of literacy, July 2021]

Reading in KS2

At KS2 we follow a mastery approach to reading through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided. We deliver four whole class reading sessions per week, from Years 2 (Spring term) –Year 6. In our reading sessions, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills. There are ‘follow on’ reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.
Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.

Each child in KS2 has a levelled reading skill book matched to their ability. They are used to up skill vocabulary, improve fluency and complement reading that takes place in whole school silent reading. Children read these books at home and in school.

Children may choose a library book from their class library or from home. These books are purely for ‘Reading for Pleasure’.